The present burial-place lies out yonder, on a hill between the
city and Vesuvius.
The old Campo Santo with its three hundred and
sixty-five pits, is only used for those who die in hospitals, and
prisons, and are unclaimed by their friends. The graceful new
cemetery, at no great distance from it, though yet unfinished, has
already many graves among its shrubs and flowers, and airy
colonnades. It might be reasonably objected elsewhere, that some
of the tombs are meretricious and too fanciful; but the general
brightness seems to justify it here; and Mount Vesuvius, separated
from them by a lovely slope of ground, exalts and saddens the
scene.
If it be solemn to behold from this new City of the Dead, with its
dark smoke hanging in the clear sky, how much more awful and
impressive is it, viewed from the ghostly ruins of Herculaneum and
Pompeii!
Stand at the bottom of the great market-place of Pompeii, and look
up the silent streets, through the ruined temples of Jupiter and
Isis, over the broken houses with their inmost sanctuaries open to
the day, away to Mount Vesuvius, bright and snowy in the peaceful
distance; and lose all count of time, and heed of other things, in
the strange and melancholy sensation of seeing the Destroyed and
the Destroyer making this quiet picture in the sun. Then, ramble
on, and see, at every turn, the little familiar tokens of human
habitation and every-day pursuits; the chafing of the bucket-rope
in the stone rim of the exhausted well; the track of carriage-
wheels in the pavement of the street; the marks of drinking-vessels
on the stone counter of the wine-shop; the amphorae in private
cellars, stored away so many hundred years ago, and undisturbed to
this hour--all rendering the solitude and deadly lonesomeness of
the place, ten thousand times more solemn, than if the volcano, in
its fury, had swept the city from the earth, and sunk it in the
bottom of the sea.
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