, like politicians, "seem to see the things that are
not," have placed all along this road, the sites of many a celebrated
town and fane--"making hue and cry after many a city which has run
away, and by certain marks and tokens pursuing to find it:" as some
old author says so quaintly. At every hundred yards, fragments of
masonry are seen by the road-side; portions of brickwork, sometimes
traced at the bottom of a dry ditch, or incorporated into a fence;
sometimes peeping above the myrtle bushes on the wild hills, where the
green lizards lie basking and glittering on them in thousands, and the
stupid ferocious buffalo, with his fierce red eyes, rubs his hide and
glares upon us as we pass. No--not the grandest monuments of Rome--not
the Coliseum itself, in all its decaying magnificence, ever inspired
me with such profound emotions as did those nameless, shapeless
vestiges of the dwellings of man, starting up like memorial tombs in
the midst of this savage but luxuriant wilderness. Of the beautiful
cities which rose along this lovely coast, the colonies of elegant and
polished Greece--one after another swallowed up by the "insatiate maw"
of ancient Rome, nothing remains--their sites, their very names have
passed away and perished. We might as well hunt after a forgotten
dream.

Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride,
They had no POET, and they died!
In vain they toil'd, in vain they bled,
They had no POET--and are dead.

I write this a Gaeta--a name famous in the poetical, the classical,
the military story of Italy, from the day of AEneas, from whom it
received its appellation, down to the annals of the late war. On the
site of our inn, (the Albergo di Cicerone,) stood Cicero's Formian
Villa; and in an adjoining grove he was murdered in his litter by the
satellites of the Triumviri, as he attempted to escape. I stood
to-night on a little terrace, which hung over an orange grove, and
enjoyed a scene which I would paint, if words were forms, and hues,
and sounds--not else. A beautiful bay, enclosed by the Mola di Gaeta,
on one side, and the Promontory of Misenum on the other: the sky
studded with stars and reflected in a sea as blue as itself--and so
glassy and unruffled, it seemed to slumber in the moonlight: now and
then the murmur of a wave, not hoarsely breaking on rock and shingles,
but kissing the turfy shore, where oranges and myrtles grew down to
the water edge. These, and the remembrances connect