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corridors and labyrinths, hewn out of the rock. At the end
of some of these long passages, are unexpected glimpses of
the daylight, shining down from above. It looks as ghastly
and as strange among the torches, and the dust, and the
dark vaults: as if it, too, were dead and buried.

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 Pom-
peii, 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 dis-
tance and lose all count of time, and heed of other things,
in the strange and melancholy sensation of seeing the

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