of Pompeii yet interred: happy the
generation that lives to learn the wondrous secrets of that sepulchre!
For, when you have once been at Pompeii, this phantasm of the past
takes deeper hold on your imagination than any living city, and
becomes and is the metropolis of your dreamland forever. O marvelous
city! who shall reveal the cunning of your spell? Something not
death, something not life--something that is the one when you turn
to determine its essence as the other! What is it comes to me at this
distance of that which I saw in Pompeii? The narrow and curving, but
not crooked streets, with the blazing sun of that Neapolitan November
falling into them, or clouding their wheel-worn lava with the black,
black shadows of the many-tinted walls; the houses, and the gay
columns of white, yellow, and red; the delicate pavements of mosaic;
the skeletons of dusty cisterns and dead fountains; inanimate garden
spaces with pygmy statues suited to their littleness; suites of fairy
bed-chambers, painted with exquisite frescos; dining-halls with
joyous scenes of hunt and banquet on their walls; the ruinous sites
of temples; the melancholy emptiness of booths and shops and jolly
drinking-houses; the lonesome tragic theatre, with a modern Pompeian
drawing water from a well there; the baths with their roofs perfect
yet, and the stucco bass-reliefs all but unharmed; around the whole,
the city wall crowned with slender poplars; outside the gates, the
long avenue of tombs, and the Appian Way stretching on to Stabiae;
and, in the distance, Vesuvius, brown and bare, with his fiery breath
scarce visible against the cloudless heaven;--these are the things
that float before my fancy as I turn back to look at myself walking
those enchanted streets, and to wonder if I could ever have been so
blest.

For there is nothing on the earth, or under it, like Pompeii.

The amphitheatre, to which we came now, after our stroll across the
cotton-fields, was small, like the vastest things in Pompeii, and had
nothing of the stately magnificence of the Arena at Verona, nor any
thing of the Roman Coliseum's melancholy and ruinous grandeur. But its
littleness made it all the more comfortable and social, and, seated
upon its benches under a cool awning, one could have almost chatted
across the arena with one's friends; could have witnessed the
spectacle on the sands without losing a movement of the quick
gladiators, or an agony of the victim given to the bea