seen on those worn as rings; and they appear in bracelets,
necklaces, etc., in such profusion and confusion of subject, and style
and date of workmanship, as to show plainly that they had lost all
superstitious value or personal significance, and had become, like
diamonds and pearls, a part of the gold-worker's material.

What the wealth and luxuriousness of those cities, now more deeply
buried than Thebes or Nineveh, must have been, we can only imagine from
the few traditions preserved by Roman historians,--grudging the glory of
rivals so long and masters so often, though finally subjects of the
irresistible force of crescent empire,--and from the gold-work known
after so many centuries of sepulture. We know that Porsenna built
himself a tomb in the solid rock,--a labyrinth whose secret no searchers
of modern times have yet found, though they have burrowed around Clusium
like marmots; and that over this he raised himself a monument,--five
towers of stone, on the top of which was laid a domed platform of brass,
and above this still towers and other brass, and higher yet, towers and
a crowning bronze dome; and that from the edges of all these platforms
hung thousands of bells, rung by the sea-breeze which every midday came
up, and still comes, across the low Etrurian hills, to find the children
she wafted from the land of the Parsee and Chaldee. It is hard to define
a "civilization"; and we talk of the ages of gold and of bronze as if we
knew the history of the whole world and its generations; but to me the
few glimpses I get through the crevices of the ages that hide Etruria,
as the hills of the Black Forest hide the fairies from the German child,
indicate an age more fitting the epithet Golden than any since, and a
nation the like of which, as of the good-folk, we shall see no more on
earth. There were confederation without over-centralization; states side
by side, without mutual hate or subjugation; wealth and power, without
the corruption that destroys nations; and military prowess, without the
unscrupulous ambition that cannot live and let live. They were
instructors of Rome in all that Rome knew of civilization; many times
masters of the imperial city, without ever envying it its existence;
mild conquerors, and just lawgivers; and the City of the Seven Hills
owed to the proximity of her seven Etrurian sisters all her early wisdom
in politics, all her knowledge of the arts which refine and preserve;
and to their love