tes of which, two or three years since, had been removed by the
Government to the town for safety....

The antiquities of Volterra consist of an Etruscan burial-ground, in
which the tombs still remain, pieces of the old and incredibly massive
Etruscan wall, including a far larger circuit than the present city, two
Etruscan gates of immemorial antiquity, older, doubtless, than any thing
at Rome, built of enormous stones, one of them serving even yet as an
entrance to the town, and a multitude of cinerary vessels, mostly of
alabaster, sculptured with numerous figures in "alto relievo." These
figures are sometimes allegorical representations, and sometimes embody
the fables of the Greek mythology. Among them are many in the most
perfect style of Grecian art, the subjects of which are taken from the
poems of Homer; groups representing the besiegers of Troy and its
defenders, or Ulysses with his companions and his ships. I gazed with
exceeding delight on these works of forgotten artists, who had the
verses of Homer by heart--works just drawn from the tombs where they had
been buried for thousands of years, and looking as if fresh from the
chisel.

THE PAESTUM OF THE GREEKS[33]

BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN

Few buildings are more familiar than the temples of Paestum; yet the
moment when the traveler first comes in sight of works of untouched
Hellenic skill is one which is simply overwhelming. Suddenly, by the
side of a dreary road, in a spot backed indeed by noble mountains, but
having no charm of its own, we come on these works, unrivaled on our
side of the Hadriatic and the Messenian strait, standing in all their
solitary grandeur, shattered indeed, but far more perfect than the mass
of ruined buildings of later days. The feeling of being brought near to
Hellenic days and Hellenic men, of standing face to face with the
fathers of the world's civilization, is one which can never pass away.
Descriptions, pictures, models, all fail; they give us the outward form;
they can not give us the true life.

The thought comes upon us that we have passed away from that Roman world
out of which our own world has sprung into that earlier and fresher and
brighter world by which Rome and ourselves have been so deeply
influenced, but out of which neither the Roman nor the modern world can
be said to spring. There is the true Doric in its earliest form, in all
its unmixed and simple majesty. The ground is strewed with shells and
covere