ddens 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 everyday 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.

THE TOMB OF VIRGIL[7]

BY AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE

A road to the right at the end of the Chiaja, leads to the mouth of the
Grotto of Posilipo, above which those who do not wish to leave their
carriages may see, high on the left, close above the grotto, the ruined
columbarium known as the Tomb of Virgil. A door in the wall, on the left
of the approach to the grotto, and a very steep staircase, lead to the
columbarium, which is situated in a pretty fruit-garden.

Virgil desired that his body should be brought to Naples from
Brundusium, where he died, B.C. 19, and there is every probability that
he was buried on this spot, which was visited as Virgil's burial-place
little more than a century after his death by the poet Statius, who was
born at Naples, and who describes composing his own poems while seated
in the shadow of the tomb. If further confirmation were needed of the
story that Virgil was laid here, it would be found in the fact that
Silius Italicus, who lived at the same time with Statius, purchased the
tomb of Virgil, restored it from the neglect into which it had fallen,
and celebrated funeral rites before it.

The tomb was originally s