pes: with dust he wipes out dust, and with decay he
blots the image of decay.

I assure the reader that I made none of these apt reflections in the
Campo Santo at Pisa, but have written them out this morning, in
Cambridge, because there happens to be an east wind blowing. No one
could have been sad in the company of our cheerful and patient cicerone,
who, although visibly anxious to get his fourteen-thousandth American
family away, still would not go till he had shown us that monument to a
dead enmity which hangs in the Campo Santo. This is the mighty chain
which the Pisans, in their old wars with the Genoese, once stretched
across the mouth of their harbor to prevent the entrance of the hostile
galleys. The Genoese with no great trouble carried the chain away, and
kept it ever afterward till 1860, when Pisa was united to the kingdom of
Italy. Then the trophy was restored to the Pisans, and with public
rejoicings placed in the Campo Santo, an emblem of reconciliation and
perpetual amity between ancient foes.[101] It is not a very good
world,--_e pur si muove_.

The Baptistery stands but a step away from the Campo Santo, and our
guide ushered us into it with the air of one who had till now held in
reserve his great stroke and was ready to deliver it. Yet I think he
waited till we had looked at some comparatively trifling sculptures by
Nicolo da Pisa before he raised his voice and uttered a melodious
species of howl. While we stood in some amazement at this, the conscious
structure of the dome caught the sound, and prolonged it with a variety
and sweetness of which I could not have dreamed. The man poured out in
quick succession his musical wails, and then ceased, and a choir of
heavenly echoes burst forth in response. There was a supernatural beauty
in these harmonies of which I despair of giving any true idea. They were
of such tender and exalted rapture that we might well have thought them
the voices of young-eyed cherubim, singing as they passed through
Paradise over that spot of earth where we stood. They seemed a celestial
compassion that stooped and soothed, and rose again in lofty and solemn
acclaim, leaving us poor and penitent and humbled.

We were long silent, and then broke forth with cries of admiration of
which the marvellous echo at once made eloquence.

"Did you ever," said the cicerone after we had left the building, "hear
such music as that?"

"The papal choir does not equal it," we answered with on