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Charles Dickens - Pictures from Italy
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.
After it was shaken by the earthquake which preceded the eruption, workmen were employed in shaping
out, in stone, new ornaments for temples and other buildings that had suffered. Here lies their work,
outside the city gate, as if they would return to-morrow.
In the cellar of Diomede's house, where certain skeletons were found huddled together, close to the door,
the impression of their bodies on the ashes, hardened with the ashes, and became stamped and fixed
there, after they had shrunk, inside, to scanty bones. So, in the theatre of Herculaneum, a comic mask,
floating on the stream when it was hot and liquid, stamped its mimic features in it as it hardened into
stone; and now, it turns upon the stranger the fantastic look it turned upon the audiences in that same
theatre two thousand years ago.
Next to the wonder of going up and down the streets, and in and out of the houses, and traversing the
secret chambers of the temples of a religion that has vanished from the earth, and finding so many fresh
traces of remote antiquity: as if the course of Time had been stopped after this desolation, and there had
been no nights and days, months, years, and centuries, since: nothing is more impressive and terrible than
the many evidences of the searching nature of the ashes, as bespeaking their irresistible power, and the
impossibility of escaping them. In the wine-cellars, they forced their way into the earthen vessels:
displacing the wine and choking them, to the brim, with dust. In the tombs, they forced the ashes of the
dead from the funeral urns, and rained new ruin even into them. The mouths, and eyes, and skulls of all
the skeletons, were stuffed with this terrible hail. In Herculaneum, where the flood was of a different and
a heavier kind, it rolled in, like a sea. Imagine a deluge of water turned to marble, at its height - and that
is what is called 'the lava' here.
Some workmen were digging the gloomy well on the brink of which we now stand, looking down, when
they came on some of the stone benches of the theatre - those steps (for such they seem) at the bottom of
the excavation - and found the buried city of Herculaneum. Presently going down, with lighted torches,
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