, in some cases,
from older pagan tombs--the inscription sometimes a palimpsest, the new
epitaph being woven into the faded letters of an earlier one.

As in an ordinary Roman cemetery, an abundance of utensils for the
worship or commemoration of the departed was disposed around--incense,
lights, flowers, their flame or their freshness being relieved to the
utmost by contrast with the coal-like blackness of the soil itself, a
volcanic sandstone, cinder of burnt-out fires. Would they ever kindle
again?--possess, transform, the place?--Turning to an [100] ashen
pallor where, at regular intervals, an air-hole or luminare let in a
hard beam of clear but sunless light, with the heavy sleepers, row upon
row within, leaving a passage so narrow that only one visitor at a time
could move along, cheek to cheek with them, the high walls seemed to
shut one in into the great company of the dead. Only the long straight
pathway lay before him; opening, however, here and there, into a small
chamber, around a broad, table-like coffin or "altar-tomb," adorned
even more profusely than the rest as if for some anniversary
observance. Clearly, these people, concurring in this with the special
sympathies of Marius himself, had adopted the practice of burial from
some peculiar feeling of hope they entertained concerning the body; a
feeling which, in no irreverent curiosity, he would fain have
penetrated. The complete and irreparable disappearance of the dead in
the funeral fire, so crushing to the spirits, as he for one had found
it, had long since induced in him a preference for that other mode of
settlement to the last sleep, as having something about it more
home-like and hopeful, at least in outward seeming. But whence the
strange confidence that these "handfuls of white dust" would hereafter
recompose themselves once more into exulting human creatures? By what
heavenly alchemy, what reviving dew from above, such as was certainly
never again to reach the dead violets?-- [101] Januarius, Agapetus,
Felicitas; Martyrs! refresh, I pray you, the soul of Cecil, of
Cornelius! said an inscription, one of many, scratched, like a passing
sigh, when it was still fresh in the mortar that had closed up the
prison-door. All critical estimate of this bold hope, as sincere
apparently as it was audacious in its claim, being set aside, here at
least, carried further than ever before, was that pious, systematic
commemoration of the dead, which, in its c