Which Is Preserved In Two Phials In A Silver
Tabernacle, And Miraculously Liquefies Three Times A-Year, To The
Great Admiration Of The People.
At the same moment, the stone
(distant some miles) where the Saint suffered martyrdom, becomes
faintly red.
It is said that the officiating priests turn faintly
red also, sometimes, when these miracles occur.
The old, old men who live in hovels at the entrance of these
ancient catacombs, and who, in their age and infirmity, seem
waiting here, to be buried themselves, are members of a curious
body, called the Royal Hospital, who are the official attendants at
funerals. Two of these old spectres totter away, with lighted
tapers, to show the caverns of death--as unconcerned as if they
were immortal. They were used as burying-places for three hundred
years; and, in one part, is a large pit full of skulls and bones,
said to be the sad remains of a great mortality occasioned by a
plague. In the rest there is nothing but dust. They consist,
chiefly, of great wide corridors and labyrinths, hewn out of the
rock. At the end of some of these long passages, are unexpected
glimpses of the daylight, shining down from above. It looks as
ghastly and as strange; among the torches, and the dust, and the
dark vaults: as if it, too, were dead and buried.
The present burial-place lies out yonder, on a hill between the
city and Vesuvius. The old Campo Santo with its three hundred and
sixty-five pits, is only used for those who die in hospitals, and
prisons, and are unclaimed by their friends. The graceful new
cemetery, at no great distance from it, though yet unfinished, has
already many graves among its shrubs and flowers, and airy
colonnades. It might be reasonably objected elsewhere, that some
of the tombs are meretricious and too fanciful; but the general
brightness seems to justify it here; and Mount Vesuvius, separated
from them by a lovely slope of ground, exalts and saddens the
scene.
If it be solemn to behold from this new City of the Dead, with its
dark smoke hanging in the clear sky, how much more awful and
impressive is it, viewed from the ghostly ruins of Herculaneum and
Pompeii!
Stand at the bottom of the great market-place of Pompeii, and look
up the silent streets, through the ruined temples of Jupiter and
Isis, over the broken houses with their inmost sanctuaries open to
the day, away to Mount Vesuvius, bright and snowy in the peaceful
distance; and lose all count of time, and heed of other things, in
the strange and melancholy sensation of seeing the Destroyed and
the Destroyer making this quiet picture in the sun. Then, ramble
on, and see, at every turn, the little familiar tokens of human
habitation and every-day pursuits; the chafing of the bucket-rope
in the stone rim of the exhausted well; the track of carriage-
wheels in the pavement of the street; the marks of drinking-vessels
on the stone counter of the wine-shop; the amphorae in private
cellars, stored away so many hundred years ago, and undisturbed to
this hour--all rendering the solitude and deadly lonesomeness of
the place, ten thousand times more solemn, than if the volcano, in
its fury, had swept the city from the earth, and sunk it in the
bottom of the sea.
After it was shaken by the earthquake which preceded the eruption,
workmen were employed in shaping out, in stone, new ornaments for
temples and other buildings that had suffered. Here lies their
work, outside the city gate, as if they would return to-morrow.
In the cellar of Diomede's house, where certain skeletons were
found huddled together, close to the door, the impression of their
bodies on the ashes, hardened with the ashes, and became stamped
and fixed there, after they had shrunk, inside, to scanty bones.
So, in the theatre of Herculaneum, a comic mask, floating on the
stream when it was hot and liquid, stamped its mimic features in it
as it hardened into stone; and now, it turns upon the stranger the
fantastic look it turned upon the audiences in that same theatre
two thousand years ago.
Next to the wonder of going up and down the streets, and in and out
of the houses, and traversing the secret chambers of the temples of
a religion that has vanished from the earth, and finding so many
fresh traces of remote antiquity: as if the course of Time had
been stopped after this desolation, and there had been no nights
and days, months, years, and centuries, since: nothing is more
impressive and terrible than the many evidences of the searching
nature of the ashes, as bespeaking their irresistible power, and
the impossibility of escaping them. In the wine-cellars, they
forced their way into the earthen vessels: displacing the wine and
choking them, to the brim, with dust. In the tombs, they forced
the ashes of the dead from the funeral urns, and rained new ruin
even into them. The mouths, and eyes, and skulls of all the
skeletons, were stuffed with this terrible hail. In Herculaneum,
where the flood was of a different and a heavier kind, it rolled
in, like a sea. Imagine a deluge of water turned to marble, at its
height--and that is what is called 'the lava' here.
Some workmen were digging the gloomy well on the brink of which we
now stand, looking down, when they came on some of the stone
benches of the theatre--those steps (for such they seem) at the
bottom of the excavation--and found the buried city of Herculaneum.
Presently going down, with lighted torches, we are perplexed by
great walls of monstrous thickness, rising up between the benches,
shutting out the stage, obtruding their shapeless forms in absurd
places, confusing the whole plan, and making it a disordered dream.
We cannot, at first, believe, or picture to ourselves, that THIS
came rolling in, and drowned the city; and that all that is not
here, has been cut away, by the axe, like solid stone.
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