THE COLOGNE CATHEDRAL

Painting by W.Witthoft

SPECIAL EDITION

WITH THE WORLD’S
GREAT TRAVELLERS

EDITED BY CHARLES MORRIS
AND OLIVER H. G. LEIGH

Vol. IV

CHICAGO

UNION BOOK COMPANY

1901

Copyright 1896 and 1897
BY
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

Copyright 1901
E. R. DuMONT

CONTENTS.

List of Illustrations

VOLUME IV

[WITH THE WORLD’S GREAT TRAVELLERS.]

THE WORLD’S GREAT CAPITALS OF TO-DAY.

OLIVER H. G. LEIGH.

[ Paris, Amsterdam.]

Paris, pleasure capital of the world, the ideal cosmopolitan city, a thousand different delights for a thousand different tastes, is as fascinating to the scholar and bookworm as to the tourist and the belle of fashion. The weary old world would die of melancholy if the light of gay Paris were to go out. Lutetia, as the Romans called the ancient town, is still the merry child in the family of nations. Fortune gave it favors without stint. Emperors and kings delighted to adorn it with a lavishness equalled by the lasting splendor of their gifts. Art and learning, the genius of ecclesiasticism and the desire for popular enjoyment, contributed the venerable edifices and their priceless treasures, and dowered the modern city with the heirlooms of many centuries. Notre Dame rose eight hundred years ago from the ruins of a fourth-century church. A few years ago were discovered the foundations of an amphitheatre capable of seating ten thousand people as far back as the year 350, when the city’s population must have been at least twice that number. No wonder all the world gathers periodically at this natural centre of everything that can make a city a miniature world in itself, for in the Paris of to-day stand side by side monuments and memorials of antiquity, and the grandest triumphs of latter-day genius in a profusion that bewilders the eye and the mind. It is as though the genii of all time and all peoples had conspired to shower their fairest gifts upon the favored spot of earth round which the drama of the ages has enacted its tremendous tableaux.

A run through its history must be the first item in the programme of the traveller who wishes to take with him his best pair of eyes. Then he will find the old gray stones turn into glass to let him see into the hidden glory behind. The lesser charms of the pretty city are palpable to any child. Yet it is impossible to look at the building or monument that first catches the eye without a flash-light of mere newspaper lore casting a momentary shadow, or glare, over it. It is not so long ago that the flames lit by the Commune brought the beautiful city nearer to ruin than all the storms of centuries had effected. In its long day Paris has suffered most of the ills that civic life is heir to. Its people have been subject to political maladies from time to time, that have endangered its very existence. A strange career, a blend of demoniac fury and light-hearted gaiety, yesterday its streets flowing with citizen and royal blood, to-day they echo with jubilant laughter, to-morrow—? The wheel is more likely to revolve than to stand long still. Paris alone among the great capitals of the world prefers change to stability, which is only another expression of her happy, mercurial temperament. France is sedate, plodding, content with present conditions until sure they can be bettered. Paris must gallop even if it costs a fall or two, which makes it the most interesting of all places.

When a city is little else than “sights” there is monotony in naming them. Paris itself commands first attention. The grandeur of its design, its famous boulevards, avenues and streets, and many of its ornamental features, must be credited to the last emperor, Napoleon III., whose dynasty came to grief at Sedan. Modern Paris owes more to his reign, and modern travellers more of their pleasure, than is ordinarily acknowledged. He bade Haussmann replace the old streets with the noble avenues that give inexhaustible sensations of delight at every turn and vista. A happy thought was that which perpetuates the great names of France in these street names; even literature is not forgotten, but reflects the honor it receives from tablets naming avenues after Montaigne, Voltaire, Hugo and others.

The three-mile walk from the Place de la Concorde to the site of the old Bastille yields the ideal of city magnificence and personal delight. There is no disappointment of even extravagant expectation. This unrivalled Place is in itself a grand intellectual as well as artistic feast. The Luxor obelisk brings into mind Egypt’s six thousand years of strangest history, its Pyramids, its Sphinx, and Napoleon. Close to it the Revolution guillotined a king and queen, and an old aristocracy. Heroic sculptures range around the Place, symbolizing eight great cities of France, that of lost Strasburg veiled in mourning. From the Place and the twelve streets radiating from the Arc de Triomphe, it is not possible to go far without coming upon some striking feature.

The Church of the Madeleine is accounted the most exquisite building in the city, though it is modelled on the art of ancient Greece. There are many triumphs of later styles, each grand, but yielding the palm to this Temple of Glory, as Napoleon intended it to be. It is three hundred and thirty feet long, one hundred and thirty wide, and one hundred high, without windows, and surrounded by Corinthian columns.

The Arc de Triomphe is the stateliest arch ever built, perfect in every respect. It was copied from the imperial arches of old Rome, with grander massiveness. It commemorates the triumphs of Napoleon.

Notre Dame is not a modern imitation. The great cathedral stands on the little Ile de la Cité which was the beginning of Paris, inhabited two thousand years ago by the Parisii, a Celtic tribe whose name survives. For eight centuries it has been a Christian church. The west front is rich in statues of the kings of France. The originals were destroyed in the Revolution, but have been replaced. The cathedral itself was turned into the mockery of a Temple of Reason, with a woman of the town enthroned as its deity. Napoleon’s wise statesmanship restored the church to its rightful usages. The Commune once more made free with the old shrine, using it as barracks. Among its relics is the robe Archbishop Darboy wore when the Communists put him to death. The churches of Paris have weird stories to tell. The sacred spot where Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, was buried, in the sixth century, was a place of worship until the Revolution changed it into a Pantheon. It became a church once more in 1851, though in its crypt lie Voltaire, Rousseau, and other famous writers. The tomb of Napoleon is beneath the Dome of the Church of the Invalides, attached to the home for veterans founded by Louis XIV.

The famous palace of the Tuileries was built in the sixteenth century for Catherine de’ Medici. It was the home of emperors and kings, and the shrine of precious treasures of art from that time down to the fall of the second empire, when the Communists destroyed it beyond repair. The politics of spite never yet inspired its votaries to create a thing of beauty for posterity to enjoy. Opposite the blank left by this vandal outrage stands the Louvre, perhaps the greatest jewel casket of art in existence, certainly beyond human power to replace if destroyed. Yet even the Louvre was, in 1870, undermined by the mob in power, who longed to blow it into nothingness—in their pious enthusiasm for enlightened progress. This two-hundred-year old palace is a wonder of architectural beauty. Its museums are famous for the statuary and paintings by the great masters. The Venus of Melos stands as the chief feature of one gallery. Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian and others of their rank are represented here among the two thousand pictures, besides innumerable masterpieces in various arts. The gallery of Apollo passes description as a chamber, were it empty. Its contents have almost fabulous value.

The Luxembourg Palace was built in 1620. It has known strange experiences—first royal habitation, then a prison during the Revolution, again a palace under the Directory and Consulate, and at last the house of the Republic’s Senate. The Palais Royal was built for Cardinal Richelieu. After his death it had a king for its master, to-day its grand arcades echo to the chatter of bargain-seeking shoppers, despite the firebrands of the Communists. Adjoining it is the national playhouse, the Comédie Française, which also had a narrow escape from the caresses of the reformers. Molière managed this theatre for a while, for which, and because he gave the world immortal plays, he was denied Christian burial. His statue, however, makes amends. A greater theatre as to size and gorgeousness is the Grand Opera House. Three acres of central ground were cleared of ordinary buildings and streets to make room for this imposing structure, which is the most ornate of its kind in the world. The mere pictures of its staircase and foyer are bewildering in magnificence.

After weariness of city sights it is good to make for the Bois de Boulogne, the main park of Paris. Its twenty-three hundred acres are connected with the Champs-Élysées by several avenues, of which the finest is the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, three hundred and fifteen feet wide and forty-two hundred long. The drive round the lake is the rendezvous of fashion every afternoon. The zoological garden, model dairy, the avenue of acacias, the field of Longchamps, where races and reviews take place, are among the showplaces. At the opposite, the east, side of the city is the spacious Bois de Vincennes, a favorite park with many attractions. The monuments of Paris are familiar to the average reader who stays at home. The July Column replaces the Bastille, the Vendôme Column, with its statue of Napoleon as Cæsar, was pulled down by the Commune and has risen again. Arches, fountains and statuary abound on all sides. Père la Chaise cemetery is the favorite field of oratory, many eulogies of the dead being political harangues of extreme types. Here are buried enough celebrities to immortalize a monumentless city, Abélard and Héloïse, Chopin, Rossini, Bellini, Cherubini, Alfred de Musset, Bernardin de St.-Pierre, Beaumarchais, Béranger, Talma, Racine, Molière, Lafontaine, Balzac, and many national statesmen. In Montmartre cemetery lie Heine, Murger, Halévy, Gautier, Troyon. Lafayette and many of the old nobility who perished in the Revolution, repose in the Picpus burial-ground.

There are many attractive places near Paris, such as Versailles, which must be counted among the city sights. This old town has grown up around the palace built by Louis XIV. It has not been inhabited by royalty since the Revolution, but is a museum devoted “to all the glories of France.” The halls are thronged with statues and portraits of the great men of history and her victorious battles. The bedroom of the Grand Monarch, the halls of the kings and marshals, the Queen’s Chamber, and every corner of the building are rich in historical memories. The great park and famous fountains, the royal coaches, the Grand Trianon villa which was the home of Madame de Maintenon, and the Petit Trianon, the cosy country cottage of Marie Antoinette, all have their fascinations. So might we notice St. Cloud, the favorite residence of the last emperor, and St. Denis, with its ancient cathedral, where the kings of France during eleven centuries were buried. The Revolutionists dug up the royal bones and flung them into a ditch, whence they were afterwards borne back into the crypt of St. Denis. The region of Paris teems with associations, grown sacred by age and sentiment, yet its citizens rarely appear to be in the serious vein. Their mode of life conduces to rapidity of thought and quick passing of emotions. Over a simple glass of sweetened water grave-looking men will vivaciously enact a dialogue which a stranger to the country might suppose was the prelude to a tragedy, when it is only a comparison of views on last night’s ballet. The outdoor gatherings in front of the innumerable cafés is one of the charms of the gay capital. The habit is Parisian to the core. They sit and quiz the human menagerie as it parades for their delectation; at least this is the complacent view taken of the moving crowd by the true Parisian. The great streets are made for grand informal parades; there is elbow room for hundreds of thousands and each avenue has a park-like aspect. The French are gifted with the instinct of perfect taste in most things, and this shows nowhere more effectively than in their planning and using a city for artistic ends. Every street stall and lamppost is made part of the general scheme of adornment.

The first few explorations of Paris will fill the mind with wonder and admiration. Then comes the irrepressible desire to know what all its magnificence, its historic object-lessons, all its inexhaustible resources of art and invention, will lead to. A hopeless question, yet the past piques curiosity about the future. So stupendous a monument to human achievement of every order surely betokens an abiding greatness. A people capable of creating a Paris must be destined to a millennium of happy peace and unbroken prosperity. National temperament rarely changes, but bitter experience cannot forget the consequences of former laxity in managing the helm of state. Paris owes it to modern civilization and to posterity to conserve its remaining treasures, at whatever cost.

Amsterdam after Paris may suggest water after wine. A watery city it is and water is excellent at times, if not always. The water streets of the Dutch capital are, sometimes, if not always, inky, and ink of an odor best described by prefixing a couple of consonants. Yet old Amsterdam is full of charm, though not of the Parisian kinds. Its quaint houses have a general look of being turned end-on to the street, their ornamental gables make a sky-line suggestive of a lady’s lace collar. Many of them have a projecting crane with rope and pulley, giving a warehouse appearance to private dwellings. They are still used to save dirtying the stairs when goods are delivered. Cleanliness is the prevailing vice of Amsterdam dames. From bedroom to kitchen every room, and everything in every room, is painfully clean. Between six and eight in the morning every good housewife swills the front of her home from the roof to the curbstone, whether it needs it or not.

LOUVRE MUSEUM, APOLLO GALLERY

The capital, as Erasmus of Rotterdam once remarked, is a place where the people dwell on the tops of trees, like birds. Amsterdam is built on three million piles, driven deep into the swampy soil. Half of its streets are canals. A large population lives in canal-boats the year round. The city is divided by large and small canals into about a hundred islands, with three hundred bridges. The inhabitants feel secure on their timber foundation, though buildings have sunk, occasionally. While the wood-worms are few and feeble and the piles keep wet there is little danger.

The river Amstel passes through the city and gives it its name from the great system of embankments which dam the ever-threatening tide from the arm of the Zuyder Zee on which Amstel-dam stands. This arm is called the Y, spelled Ij in Dutch, and will form a ship-channel, fifty miles long, to the North Sea when fully completed. A large shipping trade is done in the spacious docks, where coffee, tobacco, and sugar come in vast quantities from the Dutch East Indies. One of the industries peculiar to Amsterdam is diamond-cutting. It is not difficult to get access to one of the workshops, and the operation is exceedingly interesting. On market-days and holidays there is a chance to see the old-time picturesque costumes still worn in country parts. The metal helmets, sometimes of silver and gold, with curious ear ornaments have a fine antique air. On Sunday evenings the working folk take their pleasures in the parks, of which swinging is with many the favorite joy. A plump damsel or plumper matron stands facing the lover or husband, and they can swing almost level with the treetop before they tire, or tumble. They take no harm by a fall.

The churches are large, cold and gloomy. The Oude Kerk dates from about 1300. The stained windows are interesting and the organ, two or three stories high, is powerful and mellow. Instead of the pews covering the floor, they occupy a raised platform in the centre, enclosed by a fence with locked doors. Near by may be seen a pile of boxes like stools, which are charcoal stoves to warm the worshippers in winter. The psalmody is so slow that the organ fills up the intervals between words and lines with rolling chords. Near the palace in the centre of the city is the Niewe Kerk, a more ornate and interesting church, built in 1408, in which the sovereigns are crowned. Its monuments to Admiral de Ruyter and Vondel, the national poet, are fine art-works, as also are the carved pulpit and the bronzes in the choir.

The royal palace, on the central square called the Dam, was built in 1648. It stands on thirteen thousand piles. It was originally the State House. Opposite is the Beurs, or Exchange. The Dutch school of painting has qualities not excelled by the finest productions of other nations. Its painters developed a marvellous proficiency in detail-work, a literalness of interpretation, a realism which is undoubtedly imitative, but in its mastery of execution compels enthusiastic admiration. The flatness of their country afforded no chance for painting fine landscapes. What they saw was the sky and the sea in the distance, and people, cattle and household goods at close range. No painters among the old masters equal the Dutchmen in cloud-scapes and sea-pieces, in fidelity to nature and delicate touch. Similarly, there are few, if any, portraits as strong as these wonderful canvases of the Dutch school. No other artists had the genius to see the possible triumphs awaiting the brush that could counterfeit the dewdrop on a rose, the glisten of the copper stew-pan or the satin gown, or the fluffy texture of a beggar’s coat. Now that two generations have learned these things by patient imitation of the old Dutchmen this art has become familiar, but no copyist of our time has approached the marvellous beauty and skill that mark the old Dutch masterpieces. The traveller will enjoy himself to the full in the famous galleries of Amsterdam, and the other towns that lie within easy reach. There are four hundred paintings in the Trippenhuis museum, of which the most famous is Rembrandt’s great picture, “The Night Watch.” Still more impressive to many is the magnificent work of Vander Helst, “The Banquet of the Civic Guard,” an immense canvas, showing a band of men in armor carousing around a table loaded with gold and silver plate, glasses, flagons, etc., affording an opportunity for the painter to show Dutch art at its highest. There are great treats in these galleries for the lover of pictures and for the student of manners. Some of the old painters either lacked poetical imagination or indulged their whimsical humor to the verge of the shocking, in certain subjects. They had at least the merit of being faithful to life as they saw it, which satisfies the average man better, on the whole, than impressionism run to seed.

Eight hundred years ago Amsterdam was a fishing village. In the fifteenth century it became the most important commercial city in the Netherlands. Peter the Great learned the art of ship-building in the little village of Zaandam near the capital. A modern building encloses the cottage in which he lived. The people are rightly proud of their city and its history. They have not of late had opportunities to test their old supremacy as sea-warriors, but they exhibit all their sturdy characteristics in fighting the sea itself, repelling its ceaseless attempts at invasion. The women may be expected to uphold the national reputation for energy in any emergency, to judge by the stolid contentment with which so many of them do men’s work. They act as railway signal men, boatmen, market porters, and do not object to being harnessed with dogs as wagon teams. Yet they seem happy if not exactly gay. In the cities less of this is noticeable. The capital is not behind in artistic and literary culture. Scholarship has always distinguished its people. Its old bookstores are a delightful temptation. The zoological garden is one of the finest anywhere. English is spoken in all the principal stores. The public charities are on an extensive scale. The foreigner is occasionally embarrassed at being politely saluted by members of the Exchange if he chances to pass as they are coming out, and in many such ways he is impressed by the courtesies shown him on all hands. One would not rush to Amsterdam for Parisian excitements, but for nervous systems needing the tone best secured by moderate activity in surroundings that are novel and uniquely interesting, a visit to Amsterdam will prove as great a pleasure as a benefit.

[ FLORENCE AND ITS ART TREASURES.]

SARAH J. LIPPINCOTT.

[Mrs. Sarah J. Lippincott (“Grace Greenwood”), in her popular “Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe,” has given a well-written and appreciative account of Florence and its objects of art and interest, which we here reproduce. Our extract begins with a railway journey from Leghorn.]

The railway, which is a very good one, runs through a pleasant country cultivated like a garden, which grows more and more lovely till you reach Florence. The station is near Cascine, the fashionable drive and promenade lying just beyond the city walls, along the Arno; so that our first lookout was upon a gay and beautiful scene,—those noble grounds thronged with equestrians, and pedestrians, and elegant equipages. From that moment I have been charmed with Florence beyond all expectation and precedent. Every picturing of fancy, every dream of romance, has been met and surpassed. It is a city of enchantment, rich in incomparable treasures for the lover of poetry and art. In merely driving from the station to our hotel, on the Arno, near the Ponte Vecchio, I was struck by the noble style of architecture; uniform in solidity, and in a sort of antique solemnity, yet not monotonously gloomy or curiously quaint. But when we drove about in the brightness of a lovely morning, and saw the grand and ponderous old palaces, the noble churches, the beautiful towers, the graceful bridges,—when we caught, at almost every turn, natural pictures which art could never approach,—I could only express by broken sentences and exclamations, childishly repeated, the rare and glowing pleasure I enjoyed.

O pictures of beauty, O visions of brightness, how must ye fade under my leaden pencil! It is strange, but I never feel so poor in expression as when my very soul is staggering under the weight of new treasures of thought and feeling.

One of our first visits was to the Royal Gallery, in the Uffizi. Through several rooms and corridors, making little pause in any, we passed to the Tribune,—for its size, doubtless the richest room in the world in great works of art. In the centre stands the Venus de Medici, “the wondrous statue that enchants the world,” says the poet; but as for me, I bow not before it with any heartiness of adoration. Exquisite, tender, and delicate beyond my fairest fancy, I found the form; graceful to the last point of perfection seemed to me the attitude and action; but the smallness and the insignificant character of the head, and the simpering senselessness of the face, place it without my Olympus. I deny its divinity in toto, and bear my offerings to other shrines. Yet the Venus de Medici does not strike me as a voluptuous figure; it certainly is not powerfully and perilously so, wanting, as it does, all strength of passion and noble development of soul; for, paradoxical as it may seem, a soul of wild depths and passionate intensity must lie beneath the alluring warmth and brightness of a refined and perfect sensuality.

Of another, and a far more dangerous character, I should say, is the Venus of Titian, which hangs near it. Here is voluptuousness, gorgeous, undisguised, yet subtle, and in a certain sense poetic and refined. She is neither innocent nor unconscious, yet not bold, nor coarse, nor meretricious. She proudly and quietly revels in her own marvellous beauties, if not like a goddess who knows herself every inch divine, at least like a woman by character and position quite as free from the obligations of morality and purity. For all the wonderful beauty of this great picture, I cannot like it, cannot even tolerate it; but, with an inexpressible feeling of relief, turn from it to the Bella Donna and the Flora of the same artist. The latter is to me the most fascinating and delicious picture I have ever beheld; the richness, the fulness, the golden splendor of its beauty, flood my soul with a strange and passionate delight. There is no high peculiar sentiment about it, though it is grand in its pure simplicity; yet its soft, sunny, luxurious loveliness alone brings tears to my eyes,—tears which I dash away jealously, lest they hide for one instant the transcendent vision.

In the Tribune are several of the finest paintings of Raphael,—the Fornarina, a rich, glowing picture, but a face I cannot like; the young St. John, a glorious figure, and the Madonna del Cardellino, one of the loveliest of his holy families. There is also a great picture by Andrea del Sarto, which impressed me much; the Adoration of the Magi, by Albert Dürer, the heads full of a simple grandeur peculiar to that noble artist; and an exquisite little Virgin and Child, by Correggio. In another room, after looking at a bewildering number of pictures, most of which have already passed from my mind, I came upon a head of Medusa, by Leonardo da Vinci, which I fear will haunt me to my dying day. It is surely the most terrible painting I have ever beheld.

In the magnificent Pitti palace, among many glorious pictures, I saw two before which my heart bowed in most living adoration—the Madonna della Seggiola of Raphael, and a Virgin and Child of Murillo. The former is surely the sweetest group by the divine painter; and the last, if not of a very elevated character, pure and tender, and surpassingly lovely. In this gallery are Titian’s Bella Donna, Magdalene, and Marriage of St. Catharine. The first of these, which is a portrait, seems to me far the finest. The more I see of them the more am I impressed with the conviction that there is nothing in all his grand and varied works displaying such profound and pre-eminent genius, such subtle, masterly, miraculous power, as the portraits of Titian.

In this palace we saw Canova’s Venus, which I liked no better than I expected. There is about the head, attitude, and figure an affected, fine-ladyish air, dainty, and conscious, and passionless, which is worse than the absolute voluptuousness which would be in character at least with the earthly Venus.

I am more and more convinced that there is in sculpture but one divine mother of pure Love,—the grand and majestic Venus of Milo.

To-day we have driven out to Fiesole, and seen the massive walls of the ancient Etruscan city. These ramparts, which are called “Cyclopean constructions,” are said to be at least three thousand years old, and yet look as though they might endure to the end of time. From a hill above the town we had a large and lovely view of the beautiful valley of the Arno, and looked down upon Florence, lapped in its midst, small, compact, yet beautiful and stately. I never beheld a more enchanting picture than the broad and bright one there spread before me: the blue mountains, the gleaming river, the green and smiling valley; hills covered with olives and myrtles; roads winding between hedges of roses to innumerable villas, nestled in flowery nooks, or crowning breezy heights. Oh, this was enchantment of fairy-land, no dream of poetry; it was in very truth a paradise on earth.

On our return we visited the house of Michael Angelo, which is reverently kept by his descendants, as nearly as possible, in the same state in which he left it. It is a handsome, quaint old house, quiet, shadowy, and somewhat sombre, still pervaded with the awe-inspiring atmosphere of the colossal genius of that Titanic artist.

As I stood in his studio, or in the little cabinet where he used to write, and saw before me the many objects once familiar to his eye and hand, I felt that it was but yesterday that he was borne forth from his beloved home, and that it was the first funereal stillness and sadness which pervaded it now.

We afterwards drove to “Dante’s stone,” a slab of marble by the side of the way, on which he used to sit in the long summer evenings, rapt in mournful meditations, and dreaming his immortal dreams. It is now as sacred to his memory as the stone above his grave.

For the past two afternoons we have driven in the Cascine, by far the most delightful drive and place of reunion I have ever seen. It is much smaller and, of course, less magnificent than Hyde Park, but pleasanter, I think, in having portions more sheltered, wild, and quiet for riders and promenaders. In the centre of the grounds, opposite the Grand Duke’s farm-house, is an open space where the band is stationed, and the carriages come together to exchange compliments and hear music. Here are always to be seen many splendid turnouts, open carriages filled with elegantly-dressed ladies; gallant officers and gay dames on horseback; flower-girls, bearing about the most delicious lilies and roses, pinks and lilacs, mignonette and heliotrope, freighting the golden evening air with their intoxicating fragrance and amazing you with their paradisian profusion,—altogether a cheering and charming scene, colored and animated by the very soul of innocent pleasure.

This afternoon we met Charles Lever, riding with his wife and two daughters. They are all fine riders, were well mounted, and looked a very happy family party. Mr. Lever is much such a man as you would look to see in the author of Charles O’Malley,—hale and hearty, careless, merry, and a little dashing in his air.

This evening I have spent with the Brownings, to whom I brought letters. They live in that Casa Guidi which Mrs. Browning has already immortalized by the grandest poem ever penned by woman....

Mr. and Mrs. Browning have taken up their residence in Florence, a place in every way congenial to them. I know that thousands of her unknown friends across the water will rejoice to hear that the health of Mrs. Browning improves with every year spent in Italy. Yet she is still very delicate,—but a frail flower, ceaselessly requiring all the sheltering and fostering care, all the wealth and watchfulness of love, which is round about her....

Yesterday I saw, for the first time, the grand, antique group of Niobe and her children. Of these wonderful figures, by far the most noble and pathetic are those of the mother and the young daughter she is seeking to shield. Oh, the proud anguish, the wild, hopeless, maternal agony, of that face haunts me, and will haunt me forever.

I afterwards saw the Mercury of John of Bologna,—a marvel of beauty, grace, and lightness. We visited the treasure-room of the Pitti palace, and saw all the Grand Duke’s plate, among which are several magnificent articles by Benvenuto Cellini. In the evening we drove in the Cascine, and to the Hill of Bellosguardo, from whence we had an enchanting view of Florence and the Val d’Arno,—and so the day ended. To-day we have made the tour of the churches. In the solemn old cathedral, whose wonderful dome was the admiration and study of Michael Angelo, there were extraordinary religious ceremonies, on the occasion of some great festa. Some archbishop or other officiated in very gorgeous robes, of course,—in capital condition, and looking indolent, proud, and stupid, as another matter of course. The court came in great state and pomp, with much trumpeting and beating of the drum. The Grand Duke was accompanied by the Grand Duchess and his household, by the Guardia Nobile, and by numerous ladies and gentlemen of high rank, all in full dress. Those ball costumes of the courtly dames—gay silks and lace, diamonds, flowers, and plumes—looked strange enough after the uniform and decent sombreness of the dress prescribed for the “functions” of St. Peter’s.

The Grand Duke is a man of ordinary size, and appears not far from seventy years of age, though it is said he is hardly sixty. His hair and moustaches are nearly white, and he wears the white coat of the Austrian uniform, and so looks more miller-like than majestic. There was a sort of sullen sadness in his air, which I confess I was rather gratified to remark,—remembering all the treachery of the past, and beholding all the degradation of the present. The Grand Duchess is a dignified-looking woman enough, but the ladies in attendance on her to-day dazzled alone with their diamonds.

After hearing some fine music, we went to the Santa Croce, the Westminster Abbey of Florence, where are the tombs of its most illustrious dead. Of these, the noblest is that of Michael Angelo, and the poorest, yet more pretentious, that of Dante. Canova has here a monument to Alfieri, which is affected and sentimental, like nearly all his works; and the tombs of Galileo and Machiavelli are anything but pleasing and imposing. Infinitely better were the most simple slabs than such pompous piles.

At the San Lorenzo we saw that marvellous mausoleum, the Medicean Chapel,—the richest yet plainest structure of the kind in the world. There is here a peculiar assumption and ostentation of simplicity,—your eye, accustomed to the crowded ornament and vivid gorgeousness of ordinary princely chapels, is shocked and cheated at the first glance by the sombre magnificence, the sumptuous bareness, of this singular structure; but right soon is disappointment changed to admiration and amazement, as you see that all those lofty walls, from floor to roof, are composed of the most rare and beautiful marbles and precious stones, wrought into exquisite mosaics. Then you see the stupendous and beautiful cenotaphs, and the solemn dark statues of the Medici, and, at length, fully realize all their royal waste of wealth over this mausoleum, all their princely pomp of death.

In the Sagrestia Nuova, built by Michael Angelo, are the statues of Lorenzo and Julian de Medici, with their attendant groups, the Morn and Night, Evening and Day, and the Virgin and Child,—surely the noblest works of that mighty artist. I instinctively bowed in awe before the gloomy grandeur of Lorenzo; and there was something in his still frown which shook my soul more than the warlike air and almost startling action of Julian. The unfinished group of the Virgin and Child has much tenderness and sweetness with all its force and grandeur; but, as a general thing, I must think that Michael Angelo’s female figures are far more remarkable for gigantic proportions and muscular development than for grace, beauty, or any fine spiritual character. This Virgin is majestic almost to sublimity, yet truly gentle, lovable, divinely maternal....

In what was the refectory of an old monastery, but which was afterwards used as a carriage-house, has been found, within a few years past, a noble fresco by Raphael,—a Last Supper. This we went to see, and I felt it to be one of the purest and most touching creations of that angelic painter. In this picture, the “beloved disciple” seems to have fallen asleep on the breast of the Master, and to have bowed his head lower and lower, till it lies upon the table, while the hand of Jesus is laid caressingly upon his shoulder. There is something so exquisitely sweet and sad, so divinely pitiful, yet humanely tender, in the action, that the very memory of it blinds my eyes with tears.

After dinner we drove in the Cascine, where we met all the world. As it was an exceedingly beautiful sunset, and the evening of a festa, the band continued to play, and the brilliant crowd remained long. I revelled in the delicious air and the cheerful scene as fully as was possible, with the intrusive consciousness that I was breathing the one and beholding the other for the last time—probably forever—certainly for many years.

Mrs. H. and I here took leave of a brace of charming young nobles, in whom, I fear, we had become too deeply interested. These were two beautiful Russian boys, brothers, of the ages of nine and seven, with whom we voyaged on the Mediterranean and formed an acquaintance which has been continued in Florence. In all my life I never saw such enchanting little fellows,—simple, natural, frank, and free, yet perfect gentlemen in air and expression, displaying, with the utmost ease, grace and polish of manner, tact, wit, and savoir-faire truly astonishing. They always came to our carriage at the Cascine, and, lounging on the steps, chatted to us in French between the pieces of music. To-night, as the youngest was describing to me, very graphically, the different countries through which he had travelled and the cities which he had visited, I advised him to go next to England, and assured him that he would be greatly interested and amused by the sights and pleasures of London. With the slightest possible shrug, he replied, “Oui, madame, c’est une grande ville, sans doute; mais pour tous les amusements il n’y a qu’une ville dans le monde,—c’est Paris.” ...

As I looked back upon Florence for the last time, when I could distinguish only the battlemented Palazzo Vecchio, with its fine old tower, and that incomparable group, the Duomo, the Campanile, and the Baptistery, and a slender, shining line, which I knew for the Arno, I suddenly felt my sight struggling through tears,—real hearty tears. Ah, Bella Firenze, I went from you reluctantly, almost rebelliously; I grieved to leave those glorious galleries, through which I seemed to have merely run; I grieved to leave the Cascine, with its delicious drives and walks, its music and gayety; but I “sorrowed most of all” at parting, so soon, with my friends the Brownings. My friends, how rich I feel in being able to write these words!

I think I must venture to say a little more of them, as, after writing of my first evening at Casa Guidi, I was so happy as to enjoy much of their society. Robert Browning is a brilliant talker, and more—a pleasant, suggestive conversationist and a sympathetic listener. He has a fine humor, a keen sense of the ridiculous, which he indulges, at times, with the hearty abandon of a boy. In the gentle stream of Elizabeth Browning’s familiar talk shine deep and soft the high thoughts and star-bright imaginations of her rare poetic nature. The two have oneness of spirit, with distinct individuality; they are mated, not merged together.

In the atmosphere of so much learning and genius, you naturally expect to perceive some mustiness of old folios, some uncomfortable brooding of solemn thought; to feel about you somewhat of the stretch and struggle of grand aspiration and noble effort, or the exhausted stillness of a brief suspension of the “toil divine.” But in this household all is simple, cheerful, and reposeful; here is neither lore nor logic to appall one; here is not enough din of mental machinery to drown the faintest heart-throb; here one breathes freely, acts naturally, and speaks honestly.

[ THE LAKE REGION OF ITALY.]

ROBERT A. McLEOD.

[The lakes of northern Italy have a world-wide fame, alike for their natural beauty and for the charms of architecture and scenic art which surround them. We give here a brief description of these renowned places of pilgrimage for lovers of the beautiful.]

It was towards the end of last October that I strolled away from my occupations in the French capital to spend a fortnight on the Italian lakes. Of the many routes which from time immemorial have served for the invasion of Italy by the barbarian and the tourist, I chose on this occasion the Brenner. Apart from the pleasing views it offers, this Alpine pass is interesting as being the first over which the Romans ventured to lead their legions, and the first upon which a railway was constructed. I halted at Trent, and it was several days before I could free myself from the charm of the Etruscan city and plan my departure.

One afternoon I was making inquiries at the office of the diligence which runs to Riva on the Lake of Garda, when a newly-married German couple offered to share with me a private carriage which they had just hired for the same journey. I accepted at once, and in an hour we were off. The sober gray suit trimmed with green in which Hans was attired contrasted oddly with the brilliant purple travelling-dress of his fair-haired Gretchen. I wondered at first that they should have been willing to embarrass themselves with a stranger, until I perceived that my presence was no hinderance at all to their demonstrations of affection. We climbed up by a steep and winding road to a narrow defile which the impetuous Vella almost fills. One day, when St. Vigilius was too much pressed for time to walk over the mountain, he wrenched it apart and made this passage. The imprint of his holy hand is still to be seen on the rock. Passing under the cyclopean eyes of scores of Austrian cannon which now defend this important military position, we began to descend the valley of the Sarca. It is a wild region, where every hamlet has a ruined castle and a legend of knight or robber, saint or fairy. The picturesque remains of the Madruzzo Castle bring to mind the celebrated portraits which Titian painted of members of this noble family. The artist’s colors have survived the last of a long line, and will doubtless outlive as well the crumbling stones of their stronghold. As we skirted the little Lake of Dobling its still waters reflected rocks and trees, sky and mountain, in an enchanting manner.

“Lovely!” I exclaimed.

“Lovely!” echoed Gretchen, without taking her eyes off Hans.

“Lovely!” answered Hans, still watching the beautiful things reflected in her eyes.

After crossing the rapid Sarca and traversing a desolate tract where rocks of every size, fallen from the overhanging mountain, lie strewn about in chaotic confusion, we reached Arco. This sunny village nestles at the foot of an immense detached boulder whose dizzy summit is crowned by mediæval battlements and towers. Home fit only for birds of prey, this castle was long the nest of a family of robbers. Scarcely had we lost in the distance this greatest wonder of the valley when a sharp turn of the road brought Riva and the Lake of Garda full in view. It was a prospect of singular beauty. The sun had already set except on the highest peaks, and a part of the lake was wrapped in purple shadows. Another part, however, was as clear and light as the sky above it, and all aglow with the images of crimson and orange-tinted clouds. A shrill cry—of delight, I thought—burst from Gretchen’s lips. I was mistaken. Hans had pulled off too rudely a ring from her finger, and the fair one was in tears....

ST. GOTTHARD RAILWAY (Viaduct and Tunnel)

In the afternoon I take the famous walk to the Ponale waterfall. The road thither ascends continually. It has been skilfully led along the ledges of a precipitous cliff which borders the lake to the west of Riva, and occasionally pierces the mountain by short tunnels. After passing through the third tunnel I come to a wooden bridge, under which the Ponale dashes just before taking its final leap into the lake. The frail structure on which I stand trembles and is wet with spray, and the air is full of the roar and gurgle of the waters. But for me the main charm of the walk is not the sight of this noisy torrent, but the superb view of Riva that I get on my way back upon issuing from one of the tunnels. The eye, accustomed for a moment to the darkness, is all the more sensitive to the rich soft light which bathes the mountains and the town. A gentle breeze ripples the lake, and the brightly-painted houses that fringe the beach are seen indistinctly in the water, where they look like a line of waving banners. Half a dozen steeples and bell-towers rise gracefully from among the roofs, and their presence explains the surprising frequency with which the hours of the night are struck. From this height I can distinguish the low walls which surround the town and compress its four thousand inhabitants into the area of a small quadrilateral. But Riva, though still fortified, has a thorough look of peaceful commercial prosperity, and has quite laid aside the warlike air she wore in the Middle Ages. In those troubled times this town saw countless wars and sustained many sieges; belonged now to Venice, now to Milan, now to Austria; and at times was independent and able to defy even a bull of the pope or a rescript of the emperor....

Long before daybreak the next morning the great red and green eyes of two small steamers are looking around for passengers, and their whistles screeching that it is time to get up. I have chosen the boat which skirts the western bank. It starts an hour later than the other, but it is not yet sunrise when we push off. The after-deck is thinly peopled, chiefly by tourists, but the fore-deck, where the seats are cheaper, is crowded. We pass by the tumbling and roaring Ponale, and before many minutes we cross the invisible boundary-line between Austria and Italy. The motion of the boat is hardly felt, for we are sailing with a strong current. The high peaks to the north have already caught the first rays of the sun: masses of white vapor which have been sleeping in the mountain-hollows are roused up and put on a rosy tint. The sky is without a cloud, the lake without a ripple: we seem to be floating in mid-air.

Limone, the first stopping-place, is quite given up to the culture of the fruit from which it takes its name. A row of cypresses gives a gloomy air to the village and awakens a melancholy recollection. It was here that, in 1810, Andreas Hofer, the Tyrolese patriot, was arrested by order of Napoleon. A boat conveyed him to the prison of Peschiera, and he was soon afterwards shot in the citadel of Mantua.

We next stop before Tremosine, a village perched high up on a rock, and to which no visible road leads. On the other side of the lake, which is here narrow, the white houses of Malcesine cluster around the base of an imposing castle. This stronghold of the Middle Ages, one of the few in this neighborhood which Time has not been suffered to destroy, was built by Charlemagne, and was formerly the boundary between Austria and the Venetian territory; but it is chiefly interesting from an adventure which here befell Goethe. He had sat down in the court-yard, and was sketching one of the quaint old towers, when the crowd that had gathered around him, taking him for a spy, fell on him, tore his drawings to pieces and sent for the authorities to arrest him. Fortunately, there was in the village a man who had worked in Frankfort and knew the poet by sight, and through his influence Goethe was set free.

[From Lake Garda the traveller proceeded to the more famous Lake Como, passing localities where songful Catullus dwelt, and Virgil and Dante loved to visit.]

On the map the Lake of Como looks like an inverted and somewhat irregular Y, or, still more, like a child’s first attempt to draw a man, who without arms and with unequal legs is running off to the left. Just at the moment his picture is taken he has one foot on Lecco and the other on the town of Como. The hilly district between the two southern branches of the lake is known as the Brianza, and is noted for its bracing air, its fertile soil, and the coolness of its springs. The Brianza ends at the middle of the lake in a dolomite promontory several hundred feet high, on whose western slope lies the village of Bellaggio. This point commands the finest views in every direction: it is near the most interesting of those villas which are open to the public, and it abounds in good hotels. To visit Bellaggio is therefore the aim of every tourist who passes this way. My journey thither it is best to pass over in silence, for I see nothing, and what I feel is indescribable. I am shut up during a furious storm of wind and rain in the cabin of a little steamer which is as nervous and uneasy as if on the Atlantic. I am told, however, that in this part of the lake the banks are lofty and steep, and frequently barren, and that there are marble-quarries to be seen, and cascades and houses and villages crowning the cliffs.

On arriving at Bellaggio, I take lodging in the Villa Serbelloni, one of the many magnificent residences which poverty has induced the Italian nobles to put into the hands of hotel-keepers. The house stands high up on the very end of the promontory, and adjoining it is an extensive park, on which the ruins of a robber’s castle look down. The panorama which on a fine day spreads itself out before one who walks in these grounds is of singular beauty. The northern arm of the lake, wider and more regular than the others, opens up a long vista of headlands and bays and red-roofed villages as far as where Domaso peeps out from a grove of giant elms. Beyond, the view is bounded by the snow-covered Alps. Close at hand, near Varenna, the Fiume di Latte, a milk-white waterfall, leaps down from a height of a thousand feet. Towards Lecco huge walls of barren rock arise and wrap everything near them in sombre shadows. Towards Como the tranquil water is shut in by hills and low mountains, whose flowing lines blend gracefully together. Some of these slopes are dark with pines, some are gray with the olive, some are garlanded with vines which hang from tree to tree, while others are clothed in a rich green foliage, amid which glistens the golden fruit of the orange and the lemon. The banks are lined with bright gardens and noble parks and villas, whose lawns run down to the water’s edge and are adorned with fountains, statues, masses of brilliant flowers and clumps of tall trees. Above is a sky of Italian blue, and below is a crystal mirror in which every charm of the landscape is repeated. The impression made by all this loveliness is increased by the air of happiness that pervades the spot. It is the haunt of the rich, the gay, the newly-married: music and song, laughter and mirthful talk, are the most familiar sounds. The smile of Nature seems here to warm men’s hearts and drive away the cares they have brought with them.

It is on this site that Pliny the Younger is believed to have had the villa which he called Cothurnus or “Tragedy.” The present building is several centuries old. Tradition relates that a certain countess, one of its first occupants, had a habit of throwing her lovers down the cliff when she was tired of them. Making this delightful abode my head-quarters, I spend a week, partly in agreeable sight-seeing and partly in still more agreeable idleness. I visit villas, towers, fossil-beds, and waterfalls,—in short, everything interesting and accessible,—now going on foot, now borne from point to point in one of the sharp-prowed row-boats which are in use here, and now taking the steamer up to Colico or down to Como and back....

Across the lake from here is the Villa Carlotta, called after its former owner, the princess Charlotte of Prussia. Stepping out of his boat, the visitor ascends the marble stairs which lead up from the shore. After a few steps across the garden he reaches the villa, passes through a porch fragrant with jasmine, and is at once ushered into a small room where are some of the finest works of modern sculpture. Canova’s Mars and Venus and Palamedes are here, and they are most admirable, but they are surpassed in charm by the famous group in which Psyche is reclining and Cupid bending fondly over her. The best piece of the collection is the frieze that runs round the room. It is from the chisel of Thorwaldsen, and represents Alexander the Great’s triumphal entry into Babylon. Full of the beauty of youth, the conqueror advances in his chariot; Victory comes to meet him; vanquished nations bring presents; while behind him follow his brave Greeks on horse and on foot, dragging along with them the prisoners and the booty. The subject was suggested by Napoleon, who intended the work for the Quirinal. It is in high relief, and in general effect resembles strongly the frieze with which Phidias encircled the Parthenon. It is a pity that these masterpieces are shown first, for after seeing them one does not fully enjoy the statues and paintings in the other rooms.

Two hours may be delightfully spent in making the journey by steamboat from Bellaggio to Como. Here the lake is so narrow and winding that it seems to be a river. At every moment bold mountain-spurs project into the water appearing to bar all passage, and one’s curiosity is continually excited to find the outlet. The views shift and change with surprising quickness, for the boat stops at a dozen little towns on the way, and for this purpose keeps crossing and recrossing from shore to shore.

[Passing next to Lake Maggiore, the traveller takes a row-boat down the latter in preference to waiting for the steamer.]

The four islands that we have passed on the way are known as the Borromean Islands, because they belong for the most part to the rich and powerful Borromeo family. The rare beauty of one of them makes it the wonder of the lake. It was towards the middle of the seventeenth century that Count Vitaliano Borromeo, finding himself the possessor of almost the whole of this island, which was then a barren rock, resolved to make it his residence, and to surround himself with gardens that should rival those of Armida. For more than twenty years architects, gardeners, sculptors, and painters labored to give material form to the count’s fancies. A spacious palace was erected on one end of the island; on the other ten lofty terraces rose one above the other, like the hanging-gardens of Babylon. The rock was covered with good soil, and the choicest trees and shrubs were brought from every land. Only evergreens, however, were admitted into this Eden, for the count would have about him no sign of winter or death. In 1671 the work was finished. The island was called Isabella, after the count’s mother,—a name which has since, by a happy corruption, become changed to Isola Bella.

It is on a sunny afternoon that I direct my bark towards the “Beautiful Island.” I look on the landing-place with respect, for it is worn by the footsteps of six generations of travellers. The interior of the palace, which I visit first, is fitted up with princely magnificence and is rich in art-treasures. Mementos of kings and queens who accepted hospitality here are shown, and a bed in which Bonaparte once slept. There is a chapel where a priest daily says mass; a throne-room, as in the palaces of the Spanish grandees; and a gallery with numerous paintings. A whole suite of rooms is given up to the works of Peter Molyn, a Dutch artist, fitly nicknamed “Sir Tempest.” This erratic man, having killed his wife to marry another woman, was condemned to death. He escaped from prison, however, found an asylum here, and in return for the protection of the Borromeo of that day he adorned his walls with more than fifty landscapes and pastoral scenes.

The garden betrays the epoch at which it was laid out. Prim parterres, where masses of brilliant flowers bloom all the year round, are enclosed by walks along which orange-trees and myrtles have been bent and trimmed into whimsical patterns. There are dark and winding alleys of cedars where at every turn some surprise is planned. Here is a grotto made of shells,—there an obelisk, or a mosaic column, or a horse of bronze, or a fountain of clear water in which the attendant tritons and nymphs would doubtless disport were they not petrified into marble. There is one lovely spot where, at the middle point of a rotunda, a large statue of Hercules stands finely out against a background of dark foliage. Other Olympians keep him company and calmly eye the visitor from their painted niches. Not far from there is a venerable laurel on which Bonaparte cut the word “Battaglia” a few days before the battle of Marengo. The B is still plainly visible.

Pines and firs planted thickly along the northern side of the island defend it from cold winds. In the sunny nooks of the terraces the delicate lemon-tree bears abundant fruit and the oleander grows to a size which it attains nowhere else in Europe. The tea-plant from China, the banana from Africa, and the sugar-cane from Mississippi flourish side by side; the camphor-tree distils its aromatic essence and the magnolia loads the air with perfume. The cactus and the aloe border walks over which the bamboo bends and throws its grateful shade. Turf and flowerbeds carpet each terrace, and a tapestry of ivy and flowering vines conceals the walls of the structure. From the summit a huge stone unicorn looks down upon his master’s splendid domain. He overlooks also a corner of the island where his master’s authority is not acknowledged. The small patch of land on which the Dolphin Hotel stands has for many centuries descended from father to son in a plebeian family, nor have the Borromeos ever been able to buy it. They have to endure the inn, therefore, as Frederick endured the mill at Sans-Souci and Napoleon the house he could not buy at Paris.

At last the moment comes when I must quit Stresa, not, however, before I have visited the remaining islands and other points of interest. The steamer puts off, and soon separates me from the landscape that has been my delight for three days,—the blue bay with its verdant banks, the softly-shaded hills which enclose it, the snow-covered chain of the Simplon in the background. As we approach the southern end of the lake a colossal bronze statue of San Carlo Borromeo on the summit of a hill near Arona comes into sight. From head to foot the saint measures little less than eighty feet, and the pedestal on which he stands adds to his height half as much more. His face is turned towards Arona, his native town, and one hand is extended to bless it. With my glass I descry a party of liliputian tourists engaged in examining this great Gulliver. Most of them are satisfied when they have reached the top of the pedestal and have ranged themselves in a row on one foot of the statue. Others, more daring, climb up by a ladder to the saint’s knee, where they disappear through an aperture in the skirt of his robe. From this point the ascent continues inside of the statue, by means of iron bars, to the head, in which four persons can conveniently remain at once.

At Arona the railway-station and the wharf are near each other, and in a few minutes after I have landed an express-train starts and bears me away from the region of the Italian lakes. When we have passed the last houses of Arona and gained the open plain, the statue of the great Borromeo with his outstretched arm comes again for a few moments into view. Perhaps the uncertain light of evening and the jolting of the train deceive me, but I fancy that the good old saint is waving his hand in the familiar Italian way, as much as to say, “A rivederci!”

[ A DAY IN ROME.]

BAYARD TAYLOR.

[The things worth seeing in the Eternal City are so many, and crowd so closely upon each other, that the lover of the antique finds himself almost overwhelmed by the rapid succession of striking objects and historic ruins. It would seem that little could be seen in a day’s walk among these marvels of the past, yet Taylor’s observing eyes managed to take in a long series of interesting objects, his graphic account of which is given below.]

One day’s walk through Rome,—how shall I describe it? The Capitol, the Forum, St. Peter’s, the Coliseum,—what few hours’ ramble ever took in places so hallowed by poetry, history, and art? It was a golden leaf in my calendar of life. In thinking over it now, and drawing out the threads of recollection from the varied woof of thought I have woven to-day, I almost wonder how I dared so much at once; but within reach of them all, how was it possible to wait? Let me give a sketch of our day’s ramble.

Hearing that it was better to visit the ruins by evening or moonlight (alas! there is no moon now) we started out to hunt St. Peter’s. Going in the direction of the Corso, we passed the ruined front of the magnificent Temple of Antoninus, now used as the Papal Custom-House. We turned to the right on entering the Corso, expecting to have a view of the city from the hill at its southern end. It is a magnificent street, lined with palaces and splendid edifices of every kind, and always filled with crowds of carriages and people. On leaving it, however, we became bewildered among the narrow streets, passed through a market of vegetables, crowded with beggars and contadini, threaded many by-ways between dark old buildings, saw one or two antique fountains and many modern churches, and finally arrived at a hill.

We ascended many steps, and then descending a little towards the other side, saw suddenly below us the Roman Forum! I knew it at once; and those three Corinthian columns that stood near us, what could they be but the remains of the temple of Jupiter Stator? We stood on the Capitoline Hill; at the foot was the Arch of Septimius Severus, brown with age and shattered; near it stood the majestic front of the Temple of Fortune, its pillars of polished granite glistening in the sun as if they had been erected yesterday, while on the left the rank grass was waving from the arches and mighty walls of the palace of the Cæsars! In front ruin upon ruin lined the way for half a mile, where the Coliseum towered grandly through the blue morning mist, at the base of the Esquiline Hill!

ARCH OF TITUS, ROME

Good heavens, what a scene! Grandeur such as the world never saw once rose through that blue atmosphere; splendor inconceivable, the spoils of a world, the triumphs of a thousand armies had passed over that earth; minds which for ages moved the ancient world had thought there, and words of power and glory from the lips of immortal men had been syllabled on that hallowed air. To call back all this on the very spot, while the wreck of what once was rose mouldering and desolate around, aroused a sublimity of thought and feeling too powerful for words.

Returning at hazard through the streets, we came suddenly upon the Column of Trajan, standing in an excavated square below the level of the city, amid a number of broken granite columns, which formed part of the Forum dedicated to him by Rome after the conquest of Dacia. The column is one hundred and thirty-two feet high, and entirely covered with bas reliefs representing his victories, winding about it in a spiral line to the top. The number of figures is computed at two thousand five hundred, and they were of such excellence that Raphael used many of them for his models. They are now much defaced, and the column is surmounted by a statue of some saint. The inscription on the pedestal has been erased, and the name of Sixtus V. substituted. Nothing can exceed the ridiculous vanity of the old popes in thus mutilating the finest monuments of ancient art. You cannot look upon any relic of antiquity in Rome but your eyes are assailed by the words “Pontifex Maximus,” in staring modern letters. Even the magnificent bronzes of the Pantheon were stripped to make the baldachin under the dome of St. Peter’s.

Finding our way back again, we took a fresh start, happily in the right direction, and after walking some time, came out on the Tiber, at the Bridge of St. Angelo. The river rolled below in his muddy glory, and in front, on the opposite bank, stood “the pile which Hadrian reared on high,” now the Castle of St. Angelo. Knowing that St. Peter’s was to be seen from this bridge. I looked about in search of it. There was only one dome in sight, large and of beautiful proportions. I said at once, “Surely that cannot be St. Peter’s!” On looking again, however, I saw the top of a massive range of building near it, which corresponded so nearly with the pictures of the Vatican, that I was unwillingly forced to believe the mighty dome was really before me. I recognized it as one of those we saw from the Capitol, but it appeared so much smaller when viewed from a greater distance that I was quite deceived. On considering that we were still three-fourths of a mile from it, and that we could see its minutest parts distinctly, the illusion was explained.

Going directly down the Borgo Vecchio towards it, it seemed a long time before we arrived at the square of St. Peter’s; when at length we stood in front, with the majestic colonnade sweeping around, the fountains on each side sending up their showers of silvery spray, the mighty obelisk of Egyptian granite piercing the sky, and beyond, the great front and dome of the Cathedral, I confessed my unmingled admiration. It recalled to my mind the grandeur of ancient Rome, and mighty as her edifices must have been, I doubt if there were many views more overpowering than this. The facade of St. Peter’s seemed close to us, but it was a third of a mile distant, and the people ascending the steps dwindled to pigmies.

I passed the obelisk, went up the long ascent, crossed the portico, pushed aside the heavy leathern curtain at the entrance, and stood in the great nave. I need not describe my feelings at the sight, but I will tell the dimensions, and you may then fancy what they were. Before me was a marble plain six hundred feet long, and under the cross four hundred and seventeen feet wide! One hundred and fifty feet above sprang a glorious arch, dazzling with inlaid gold, and in the centre of the cross there were four hundred feet of air between me and the top of the dome! The sunbeam stealing through the lofty window at one end of the transept made a bar of light on the blue air, hazy with incense, one-tenth of a mile long before it fell on the mosaics and gilded shrines of the other extremity. The grand cupola alone, including lantern and cross, is two hundred and eighty-five feet high, or sixty feet higher than the Bunker Hill Monument, and the four immense pillars on which it rests are each one hundred and thirty-seven feet in circumference. It seems as if human art had outdone itself in producing this temple,—the grandest which the world ever erected for the worship of the Living God! The awe felt in looking up at the giant arch of marble and gold did not humble me; on the contrary, I felt exalted, ennobled,—beings in the form I wore planned the glorious edifice, and it seemed that in godlike power and perseverance they were indeed but a “little lower than the angels.” I felt that, if fallen, my race was still mighty and immortal.

The Vatican is only open twice a week, on days which are not festas; most fortunately, to-day happened to be one of these, and we took a run through its endless halls. The extent and magnificence of the gallery of sculpture is perfectly amazing. The halls, which are filled to overflowing with the finest works of ancient art, would, if placed side by side, make a row more than two miles in length! You enter at once into a hall of marble, with a magnificent arched ceiling, a third of a mile long; the sides are covered for a great distance with inscriptions of every kind, divided into compartments according to the era of the empire to which they refer. One which I examined appeared to be a kind of index of the roads in Italy, with the towns on them; and we could decipher on that time-worn block the very route I had followed from Florence hither.

Then came the statues, and here I am bewildered how to describe them. Hundreds upon hundreds of figures,—statues of citizens, generals, emperors, and gods; fauns, satyrs, and nymphs, born of the loftiest dreams of grace; fauns on whose faces shone the very soul of humor, and heroes and divinities with an air of majesty worthy the “land of lost gods and godlike men!”

I am lost in astonishment at the perfection of art attained by the Greeks and Romans. There is scarcely a fourth of the beauty that has ever met my eye which is not to be found in this gallery. I should almost despair of such another blaze of glory on the world were it not for my devout belief that what has been done may be done again, and had I not faith that the dawn in which we live will bring another day equally glorious. And why should not America with the experience and added wisdom which three thousand years have slowly yielded to the old world, joined to the giant energy of her youth and freedom, re-bestow on the world the divine creations of art? Let Powers answer!

But let us step on to the hemicycle of the Belvedere, and view some works greater than any we have yet seen or even imagined. The adjoining gallery is filled with masterpieces of sculpture, but we will keep our eyes unwearied and merely glance along the rows. At length we reach a circular court with a fountain flinging up its waters in the centre. Before us is an open cabinet; there is a beautiful manly form within, but you would not for an instant take it for the Apollo. By the Gorgon head it holds aloft we recognize Canova’s Perseus,—he has copied the form and attitude of the Apollo, but he could not breathe into it the same warming fire. It seemed to me particularly lifeless, and I greatly preferred his Boxers, who stand on either side of it. One, who has drawn back in the attitude of striking, looks as if he could fell an ox with a single blow of his powerful arm. The other is a more lithe and agile figure, and there is a quick fire in his countenance which might overbalance the massive strength of his opponent.

Another cabinet,—this is the far-famed Antinous. A countenance of perfect Grecian beauty, with a form such as we would imagine for one of Homer’s heroes. His features are in repose, and there is something in their calm, settled expression strikingly like life.

Now we look on a scene of the deepest physical agony. Mark how every muscle of old Laocoon’s body is distended to the utmost in the mighty struggle! What intensity of pain in the quivering distorted features! Every nerve which despair can call into action is excited in one giant effort, and a scream of anguish seems first to have quivered on those marble lips. The serpents have rolled their strangling coils around father and sons, but terror has taken away the strength of the latter, and they make but feeble resistance. After looking with indifference on the many casts of this group, I was the more moved by the magnificent original. It deserves all the admiration that has been heaped upon it.

I absolutely trembled on approaching the cabinet of the Apollo. I had built up in fancy a glorious ideal, drawn from all that bards have sung or artists have rhapsodized about its divine beauty,—I feared disappointment,—I dreaded to have my ideal displaced and my faith in the power of human genius overthrown by a form less perfect. However, with a feeling of desperate excitement I entered and looked upon it.

Now, what shall I say of it? How make you comprehend its immortal beauty? To what shall I liken its glorious perfection of form, or the fire that imbues the cold marble with the soul of a god? Not with sculpture, for it stands alone and above all other works of art,—nor with men, for it has a majesty more than human. I gazed on it, lost in wonder and joy,—joy that I could at last take into my mind a faultless ideal of godlike, exalted manhood. The figure appears actually to possess a spirit, and I looked on it not as on a piece of marble but a being of loftier mould, and half expected to see him step forward when the arrow reached its mark. I would give worlds to feel one moment the sculptor’s mental triumph when his work was completed; that one exulting thrill must have repaid him for every ill he might have suffered on earth! With what divine inspiration has he wrought its faultless lines! There is a spirit in every limb which mere toil could not have given. It must have been caught in those lofty moments

“When each conception was a heavenly guest—
A ray of immortality—and stood,
Star-like, around, until they gathered to a god?”

We ran through a series of halls, roofed with golden stars on a deep blue midnight sky, and filled with porphyry vases, black marble gods, and mummies. Some of the statues shone with the matchless polish they had received from a Theban artisan before Athens was founded, and are, apparently, as fresh and perfect as when looked upon by the vassals of Sesostris. Notwithstanding their stiff, rough-hewn limbs, there were some figures of great beauty, and they gave me a much higher idea of Egyptian sculpture. In an adjoining hall, containing colossal busts of the gods, is a vase forty-one feet in circumference, of one solid block of red porphyry.

The “Transfiguration” is truly called the first picture in the world. The same glow of inspiration which created the Belvedere must have been required to paint the Saviour’s aerial form. The three figures hover above the earth in a blaze of glory, seemingly independent of all material laws. The terrified Apostles on the mount, and the wondering group below, correspond in the grandeur of their expression to the awe and majesty of the scene. The only blemish in the sublime perfection of the picture is the introduction of the two small figures on the left hand, who, by the bye, were Cardinals, inserted there by command. Some travellers say the color is all lost, but I was agreeably surprised to find it well preserved. It is, undoubtedly, somewhat imperfect in this respect, as Raphael died before it was entirely finished; but “take it all in all,” you may search the world in vain to find its equal.

[This ended the day’s tour of observation. On a succeeding day the traveller saw as many objects of interest; among them the graves of Shelley and Keats. These, however, we must pass by, and describe his visit to the ruins of the great Roman amphitheatre.]

Amid the excitement of continually changing scenes I have forgotten to mention our first visit to the Coliseum. The day after our arrival we set out with two English friends to see it by sunset. Passing by the glorious fountain of Trevi, we made our way to the Forum, and from thence took the road to the Coliseum, lined on both sides with remains of splendid edifices. The grass-grown ruins of the palace of the Cæsars stretched along on our right; on our left we passed in succession the granite front of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, the three grand arches of the Temple of Peace, and the ruins of the Temple of Venus and Rome. We went under the ruined triumphal arch of Titus, with broken friezes representing the taking of Jerusalem, and the mighty walls of the Coliseum gradually rose before us. They grew in grandeur as we approached them, and when at length we stood in the centre, with the shattered arches and grassy walls rising above and beyond one another far around us, the red light of sunset giving them a soft and melancholy beauty, I was fain to confess that another form of grandeur had entered my mind of which before I knew not.

A majesty like that of nature clothes this wonderful edifice. Walls rise above walls, and arches above arches, from every side of the grand arena, like a sweep of craggy pinnacled mountains around an oval lake. The two outer circles have almost entirely disappeared, torn away by the rapacious nobles of Rome, during the middle ages, to build their palaces. When entire and filled with its hundred thousand spectators, it must have exceeded any pageant which the world can now produce. No wonder it was said,—

“While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand;
When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall;
And when Rome falls, the world!”

—a prediction which time has not verified. The world is now going forward prouder than ever, and though we thank Rome for the legacy she has left us, we would not wish the dust of her ruin to cumber our path....

Next to the Coliseum, the baths of Caracalla are the grandest remains at Rome. The building is a thousand feet square, and its massive walls look as if built by a race of giants. These Titan remains are covered with green shrubbery, and long trailing vines sweep over the cornice and wave down like tresses from the architrave and arch. In some of its grand halls the mosaic pavement is yet entire. The excavations are still carried on. From the number of statues already found, this would seem to have been one of the most gorgeous edifices of the olden time.

THE FAMOUS BRIDGE OF THE RIALTO, VENICE

I have been now several days loitering and sketching among the ruins, and I feel as if I could willingly wander for months beside these mournful relics, and draw inspiration from the lofty yet melancholy lore they teach. There is a spirit haunting them real and undoubted. Every shattered column, every broken arch and mouldering wall, but calls up more vividly to mind the glory that has passed away. Each lonely pillar stands as proudly as if it still helped to bear up a great and glorious temple, and the air seems scarcely to have ceased vibrating with the clarions that heralded a conqueror’s triumph....

In Rome there is no need that the imagination be excited to call up thrilling emotion or poetic revery; they are forced on the mind by the sublime spirit of the scene. The roused bard might here pour forth his thoughts in the wildest climaces, and I could believe he felt it all. This is like the Italy of my dreams,—that golden realm whose image has been nearly chased away by the earthly reality. I expected to find a land of light and beauty, where every step crushed a flower or displaced a sunbeam; where every air was poetic inspiration, and whose every scene filled the soul with romantic feelings. Nothing is left of my picture but the far-off mountains, robed in the sapphire veil of the Ausonian air, and these ruins, amid whose fallen glory sits triumphant the spirit of ancient song.

I have seen the flush of morn and eve rest on the Coliseum; I have seen the noonday sky framed in its broken loop-holes, like plates of polished sapphire; and last night, as the moon has grown into the zenith, I went to view it with her. Around the Forum all was silent and spectral; a sentinel challenged us at the Arch of Titus, under which we passed, and along the Cæsars’ wall, which lay in shadow. Dead stillness brooded around the Coliseum; the pale, silvery lustre streamed through its arches and over the grassy walls, giving them a look of shadowy grandeur which day could not bestow. The scene will remain fresh in my memory forever.

[ POMPEII AND ITS DESTROYER.]

ALFRED E. LEE.

[The ruins of Pompeii perhaps surpass in general interest any other of the exhumed remains of man’s ancient industry, and the story of them has been very frequently told. For a good general description we go to the “European Days and Ways” of Alfred E. Lee, who also deals with Vesuvius as well as with its victim. He tells us the whole history of the excavation, of which we can but say here that up to 1860 not more than one-third of the town was excavated, and that in 1863 the archæologist Fiorelli was appointed to supervise the work, which has gone on steadily since.]

The ancient Pompeiians who gazed upon and admired the beauteous groves and pastures which covered the symmetrical cone up to the very rim of its smokeless, silent crater must have had but a faint idea of the real nature of their terrible neighbor. But in the year 63 they received a most impressive and—had it been heeded—timely warning of what they were to expect. A fearful earthquake shook down their temples, colonnades, and dwellings, giving awful premonition of the reawakening of the stupendous forces of nature, which had been slumbering for centuries. The city was a wreck, but it was immediately rebuilt, and was greatly improved by conforming its architecture more nearly than before to the style of imperial Rome. A reaction from the depressing effects of disaster was at high tide, and Pompeii was doubtless more splendid and more gay than ever, when, on the 24th of August, 79, it was overtaken by the supreme catastrophe, the details of which, in the absence of authentic narrative, have been supplied by the romance of Bulwer. First came a dense shower of ashes, which covered the town to the depth of three feet, impelling most of its inhabitants to fly from its precincts. This was followed by a delusive lull, during which many of the fugitives returned to seek their valuables, and perhaps to care for the sick and infirm who could not be readily removed. But directly the shower of ashes was succeeded by a heavy rain of red-hot cinders and pumice, called rapilii, from which there was no escape. This covered the town with another stratum, seven to eight feet thick, burning the wooden upper stories from the houses, and extinguishing the last vestige of animal life. On top of this the remorseless Cyclops shook down more showers of ashes and then fiery rapilii, until the superincumbent mass attained an average thickness of twenty feet, and the beautiful city of the Sarno was literally smothered,—buried alive, with scarcely a single trace of it above ground. For nearly seventeen centuries Pompeii, except as a name and memory, disappeared from history. In ancient times its ruins were ransacked, partly by the survivors of its wreck, in recovering their valuables and the dead bodies of their friends, and partly in the search for decorative materials with which to embellish temples and other buildings. In this way the city was stripped of nearly everything easily accessible which was worth carrying away. Subsequent Vesuvian eruptions covered it still more deeply, vegetation grew over it, and a village bearing its name rose upon the ground which covered its ancient site. During the Middle Ages the place was entirely unknown. In 1592 a subterranean aqueduct, which is in use to this day, was carried under it without leading to its discovery. In 1748 some statues and bronze utensils, discovered by a peasant, attracted the attention of the reigning king of Naples and Sicily, Charles III., who caused excavations to be made. At that time the theatre, amphitheatre, and other portions of the buried town were brought to light, discoveries which caused great surprise and enthusiasm throughout the civilized world....

The excavated portion of the city, together with its museum and library, are under the care of a corps of government guards, who, for a European wonder, are forbidden to accept gratuities. Quite agreeably to me, my visit fell on a holiday, when the guides were off duty, so that I was permitted to wander at will among the silent streets, unembarrassed by long and apocryphal verbal explanations. A previous visit had familiarized me with the principal streets, buildings, and localities, so that I had no difficulty in finding my way. Besides a considerable region which had been excavated since my first visit, eighteen months before, there were some important buildings which I had not then been able to inspect. Among these was the Villa Diomed, so conspicuous in Bulwer’s romance. This villa—more properly speaking, the house of M. Arrius Diomedes—was one of the largest and most splendid of the Pompeiian residences, and, in addition to the usual conveniences and luxuries of an elegant mansion of that day, enclosed an interior court, or garden, one hundred and seven feet square, open to the sky, surrounded by a colonnade, and embellished by a central fountain. Beneath this court, on three sides, are long vaulted chambers, reached by stair-ways, and lighted by narrow apertures in the upper pavement. These cellars, now entirely cleared of rubbish, are believed to have been used in the summer season as family promenades. “In them,” says Bulwer, “twenty skeletons (two of them babes, embracing) were discovered in one spot by the door, covered by a fine ashen dust that had evidently been slowly wafted through the apertures until it had filled the whole space. There were jewels and coins, and candelabra for unavailing light, and wine, hardened in the amphoræ, for a prolongation of agonized life. The sand, consolidated by damps, had taken the forms of the skeletons as in a cast, and the traveller may yet see the impression of a female neck and bosom, of young and round proportions, the trace of the fated Julia! It seems to the inquirer as if the air had been gradually changed into a sulphurous vapor; the inmates of the vaults had rushed to the door and found it closed and blocked up by the scoriæ without, and in their attempts to force it had been suffocated with the atmosphere. In the garden was found a skeleton with a key by its bony hand, and near it a bag of coins. This is believed to have been the master of the house, the unfortunate Diomed, who had probably sought to escape by the garden, and been destroyed either by the vapors or some fragment of stone. Beside some silver vases lay another skeleton, probably a slave.” The impression of a girl’s breast in the ashes, which Bulwer’s fancy represents as the sole remaining trace of one of his heroines, is still preserved in the museum at Naples, and is as shapely and perfect as if the flesh of the fair young victim had been moulded but yesterday instead of eighteen hundred years ago. The bodies found in the Diomedan corridors had their heads wrapped up, and were half covered by the fine infiltrated ashes, in which was preserved even the imprint of the chemises worn by the women and children. The bodies had decayed, like those embedded in other parts of the town, but their forms had been moulded in the ashes with wonderful precision and distinctness.

In many cases such cavities, after the skeletons contained in them had been carefully removed, were filled with liquid plaster, which produced an accurate and durable image of the imprinted form. The museum at Pompeii contains a collection of such images, which impress upon the beholder, more vividly, perhaps, than any other objects, the horror and consternation of those awful days when the rain of volcanic ashes turned noon to night and overwhelmed the doomed city. One of these figures is that of a girl with a ring on her finger; another, that of a woman enceinte; a third, a man whose features are singularly distinct and natural. A group of three includes father, mother, and daughter, found lying near one another. The figure of a female shows even the folds of her drapery and the arrangement of her hair. The attitudes are generally those which follow a short and fierce death-struggle. Some of the victims seem to have fallen upon their faces and died suddenly in their flight. Others, who were perhaps asphyxiated by vapors, have the calm attitude of sleep, as though death had been but a pleasant dream.

Near the Great Theatre an open court with a peristyle of seventy-four columns is surrounded by a series of detached cells. This is supposed to have been a barrack for confinement of the gladiators who were chosen for the contests of the arena. Sixty-three skeletons found here are believed to have been those of soldiers who remained on duty during the eruption. In one of the chambers, used as a prison, the skeletons of two presumable criminals were found, together with the stocks and irons with which they were bound for punishment. The story that the people were assembled, in great numbers, to witness some spectacular entertainment at the time the volcano began to belch upon them its rain of ashes is probably a myth. The theatre had been badly wrecked by the earthquake of 63, and its restoration was yet far from complete when the eruption broke forth. The streets of Pompeii are generally narrow, not over twenty-four—some of them not over fourteen—feet in width, and are paved with blocks of lava, with high stepping-stones at intervals, for the convenience of foot-passengers in rainy weather. At the street corners public fountains are placed, from which the water poured through the decorative head of a god, a mask, or some similar ornament. Trade signs are rare, but political announcements are frequently seen, conspicuously printed in red letters. Phallic emblems, boldly cut in stone and built into the walls, surprise and shock us by their frequency, notwithstanding their innocently meant purpose as a means of protection against witchcraft. The architecture of the temples and other public buildings is a clumsy mixture of the Greek and Roman style, the columns being invariably laid up in brick or travertine, and covered with stucco. The dwellings, built of the same materials, or of travertine, have very little exterior adornment. Yet at the time of its catastrophe Pompeii must have been a highly decorated town. Marble was but little used architecturally, but the stucco which took its place was admirably adapted to decorative painting, and this means of ornamentation was lavishly employed.

The lower halves of the columns are generally painted red, with harmonizing colors on the capitals. Interior walls are also laid with bright, gay coloring, usually red or yellow. But the most attractive and striking of the mural decorations are the paintings, the wonderful variety and delicacy of which are only surpassed by the more astonishing wonder of their preservation. The subjects of these pictures are generally drawn from poetry or mythology, as, for instance, Theseus abandoning Ariadne, Ulysses relating his adventures to Penelope, Cupid holding a mirror up to Venus, Apollo and the Muses, Polyphemus receiving Galatea’s letter from Cupid, Leda and the Swan, Diana surprised in her bath by Actæon, Achilles and Patroclus, and representations of Venus, Cupid, Bacchus, Silenus, Mercury, and the fauns in endless variety. A favorite subject was the beautiful youth Narcissus, son of the river-god Cephisus and the nymph Liriope. According to the Greek fable, this youth, seeing his image in a fountain, became enamoured of it, and, in punishment for his hardness of heart towards Echo and other nymphs, pined away and was changed to a flower. In consequence of its origin, this flower loves the borders of streams, and, bending on its fragile stem, seems to seek its own image in the waters, but soon fades and dies.

The larger and finer dwellings of Pompeii have generally been named from their supposed possessors, or from the works of art found in them. The House of the Tragic Poet, so called from the representation of a poet reading found in its tablinium, was one of the most elegant in Pompeii. From the pavement of its vestibule was taken a celebrated mosaic, now in the museum at Naples, representing a chained dog barking, with the legend “cave canem”—“beware of the dog." The periphery of the columns of the peristyle is fluted, except the lower third of the shaft, which is smooth and painted red. The walls of the interior are decorated with paintings, among which are Venus and Cupid fishing, Diana with Orion, and a representation of Leda and Tyndarus, which is very beautiful and remarkably well preserved. This house, which figures in Bulwer’s “Last Days of Pompeii” as the home of Glaucus, was probably the dwelling of a goldsmith. One of the most palatial residences yet brought to light is the House of Pansa,—one hundred and twenty-four by three hundred and nineteen feet,—which finely illustrates, in its complete and well-preserved appointments, the plan of an aristocratic Pompeiian mansion of the imperial epoch. Entering from the street by a vestibule, in the floor of which the greeting, “Salve,” was wrought in beautiful mosaic, we reach a large interior court (atrium), which, owing to the absence of glass or exterior openings, was necessary for the admission of light and air to the surrounding chambers. A reservoir for rain-water (impluvium) occupies the centre of the atrium. Passing from the atrium through a large apartment called the tablinium, we enter, towards the rear, the strictly domestic part of the house, which occupies more than half the space within its walls, and is also provided with an interior court. The family apartments open into this court, and derive from it their light and ventilation. It encloses a garden surrounded by a peristyle, and hence takes the name of peristylium. The front part of the house, surrounding the atrium, was that in which the proprietor transacted his business and held intercourse with the external world; the rear part, surrounding the peristylium, was devoted to domestic use exclusively. The roof, sloping inward, and open over the interior courts, discharged the rain which fell upon it into the impluvium. The images of the household gods usually occupied a place in the vestibule. The House of Sallust, so named from an epigraph on its outside wall, appears from later discoveries to have been the property of A. Cossius Libanus. This house was finished in gay colors and embellished with mural paintings, one of which—a representation of Actæon surprising Diana at her bath—is singularly well preserved. Other subjects treated are the rape of Europa (badly defaced), and Helle in the sea extending her arm to Phryxus. Opposite to the Actæon is a dainty chamber, arbitrarily named the venereum, surrounded by polygonal columns painted red. The impluvium was adorned with a bronze group—now in the museum at Palermo—representing Hercules contending with a stag. Out of the mouth of the stag, in this group, the waters of the fountain gushed. Some of the bedrooms of this house were floored with African marble.

The House of Meleager takes its name from one of its mural decorations illustrating the story of Meleager and Atalanta. Other frescos adorn its walls, representing the judgment of Paris, Mercury presenting a purse to Ceres, and a young satyr frightening a bacchante with a serpent. Its peristylium, sixty by seventy-three feet, is the finest yet found in Pompeii. The columns of the peristylium are covered with yellow stucco and its chambers are floored with mosaic. A colonnade rises on three sides of the dining-room, and one of twenty-four columns, red below and white above, supports the portico. A garden to the left of the atrium and in front of the portico is adorned by a pretty fountain. An exquisite bronze statuette of a dancing faun, now in the Naples museum, gave its present title to the most beautiful and also one of the largest houses in Pompeii. The discovery of this house was first made in 1830, in the presence of a son of the poet Goethe. A small pedestal, on which the statuette of the faun stood, is still seen in the marble-lined impluvium. In the mosaic floor of one of the rooms near by three doves are represented drawing a string of pearls from a casket. Mosaics in the dining-room represented Acratus (companion of Bacchus) riding on a lion, a cat devouring a partridge, and a group of crustaceans and fishes. The salutation, “Have,” (welcome) is wrought with colored marble in the pavement of the vestibule before the main entrance. The walls are covered with stucco made of cement, in imitation of colored marble.

The atrium, thirty-five by thirty-eight feet, is finished in the Tuscan style, but the twenty-eight columns surrounding the peristylium are Ionic. In the rear of the mansion opens a garden, one hundred and five by one hundred and fifteen feet, enclosed with a peristyle of fifty-six Doric columns. Various articles in gold, silver, bronze, and terra-cotta were found in this house, and also some skeletons, one of which was that of a woman with a gold ring on her finger engraved with the name Cassia. But the most important discovery of all made in the House of the Faun was that of the magnificent mosaic of Alexander in the battle of Issus. “This work, which is almost the only ancient historical composition in existence, represents the battle at the moment when Alexander, whose helmet has fallen from his head, charges Darius with his cavalry and transfixes the general of the Persians, who has fallen from his wounded horse. The chariot of the Persian monarch is prepared for retreat, whilst in the foreground a Persian of rank, in order to insure the more speedy escape of the king, who is absorbed in thought at the sight of his expiring general, offers him his horse.”—Baedeker.

Such are some of the principal mansions of Pompeii and the objects found in them. All of the most precious works of art which were or could be detached, including many exquisite little mural frescos, have been removed and deposited in the museum at Naples. The ruins and the museum explain each other, and taken together furnish the most complete and vivid illustration of ancient life in the world. No books, no pictures, can tell us so clearly and comprehensively how the people of that day and country lived as the remains of this buried city. Its dwellings, shops, streets, prisons, temples, theatres, and tombs disclose with amazing fulness and accuracy the pursuits, habits, follies, vices, and even the thoughts of its inhabitants, just as they were living and moving when caught, overwhelmed, and forever stilled in the full tide of their existence. Well-curbs worn by the sliding rope, stepping-stones hollowed by the march of eager multitudes, pavements scarred by the stamp of horses’ hoofs, advertisements painted on public walls, shops and magazines containing the symbols and utensils of trade, fountains where the crystal torrent might have hushed but an hour ago its rippling voice, temples whose altars bear yet the marks of sacrificial fires, frescos whose color and outline are bright and delicate in spite of calamity and time, mosaic floors smooth and shining as if polished only yesterday by the dance of dainty feet,—these and a thousand more traces of the life of that ancient time help the imagination to re-people and restore the ruined city as it was in the day of its pride and splendor.

An inspection of the ruins of Pompeii deepens upon the mind its impressions of the sublimity and terror of Vesuvius. Physically speaking, the volcano is but a monstrous heap of ashes, stones, and scoriæ, hollow, or partially so, in the centre, and streaked with black, solidified lava-currents on the outside. From the crater, whirling volumes of steam and smoke constantly issue, each rotary gush representing an interior explosion, usually heard only on the summit. In the varying states of the atmosphere this monstrous volume of vapor rises in columnar form for thousands of feet, and is then borne far to seaward, or landward, by the upper currents of the air; or it falls in a dense, sulphurous, shapeless cloud, which envelops and conceals the upper part of the mountain. In the latter condition of things I made my first ascent; in the former my second. On the first occasion we went up from Portici and down to Pompeii; on the second, the route was reversed.

From Pompeii the summit may be made—on horseback as far as the foot of the cone—in about three hours. The railway on the Portici side ascends to the outside rim of the crater, within which, separated by fissured slabs of lava, which a yard below the surface yet glow with living fire, the main chimney or flue of the volcano rises some hundreds of feet higher. On the eastern side, below the rim, a lava stream of considerable magnitude had burst forth at the time of my visit, and was issuing with a fierce hissing sound. Its course could be traced down the slopes of the mountain for the distance of a mile. Its movement, at first quite rapid, was soon checked by the cooling effect of the atmosphere. The operations of the crater at this time were extremely interesting. Near the base of the finial cone a small secondary volcanic funnel had recently been formed, which sometimes almost silenced with its screeching and blubber the thunderous rumbling within the main chimney. Neither of the active craters could be approached with safety, but they made no objections to being looked at, and so, dismissing my guide, I remained about two hours on the summit, watching their antics. Sometimes the smaller crater, or safety-valve, as it seemed to be, would work itself up to a perfect frenzy of hysterical hissing and shrieking, as though all the misery of a hundred colicky locomotives were venting itself in one prolonged scream. During such spells the red liquid lava would bubble over the rim for a time, like the boiling of an overfilled pot; then suddenly some explosive interior force would throw it into the air in a sheaf of beautiful red spray, rising and descending in graceful parabolas all around the cone. After this performance, the little fellow would subside and keep tolerably quiet for ten minutes or so, when it would be seized with another paroxysm.

The larger crater, though also intermittent, was more progressive and less fidgety in its action. Its behavior had the dignified air of regular business, while the safety-valve demeaned itself more as a transient upstart, impatient of attracting popular attention. The masses of steam and smoke issuing from the main orifice were somewhat irregular, both in quantity and velocity, their increase in both respects being always accompanied by louder and more rapid interior explosions. At the moments of greatest activity showers of stones and lumps of red lava were hurled into the air to heights varying from three hundred to one thousand feet, and, descending, rolled rattling and smoking down the yellow, sulphurous sides of the cone. The spectacle was terrifically sublime at times, particularly when the safety-valve chimed in with its screaming accompaniment, and flung aloft its jet-d’eau-like pyrotechnics. The missiles projected from the main crater soared at an angle of about fifty degrees, and almost uniformly in the same direction, so that they fell on territory of which the spectator, looking on from the opposite point of the compass, was quite willing to accord monopoly of possession, with a liberal margin for unadjusted boundary.

As sunset approached, and the shades of evening were beginning to add new touches of grandeur to the sublime spectacle, I took leave of it reluctantly, and, with Brobdingnagian strides down the volcanic ash-heap, descended in not more than seven minutes a space which it had once cost me a weary half-hour and the help of two guides to climb. Three hours later the red currents of lava could be seen from my window in Naples, glittering far away in the darkness, and streaking the black sides of the volcano like descending streams of molten gold.

[ MOUNT ETNA IN ERUPTION.]

BAYARD TAYLOR.

[It is not Etna in one of its gigantic throes of eruption that we propose to describe. The traveller whose story of the mountain we append was not fortunate enough to witness such a spectacle. But he saw it in a minor phase of activity, and describes the vision so well that his account is well worth repeating. It was on his way from Malta to Sicily that he first caught sight of the volcano, ninety miles away, rising in solitary state behind the nearer mountains. He continued his course till abreast of Syracuse, “with Etna as distant as ever.”]

The fourth morning dawned, and—great Neptune be praised!—we were actually within the Gulf of Catania. Etna loomed up in all his sublime bulk, unobscured by cloud or mist, while a slender jet of smoke, rising from his crater, was slowly curling its wreaths in the clear air, as if happy to receive the first beam of the sun. The towers of Syracuse, which had mocked us all the preceding day, were no longer visible; the land-locked little port of Augusta lay behind us; and, as the wind continued favorable, ere long we saw a faint white mark at the foot of the mountain. This was Catania.

The shores of the bay were enlivened with orange-groves and the gleam of the villages, while here and there a single palm dreamed of its brothers across the sea. Etna, of course, had the monarch’s place in the landscape, but even his large, magnificent outlines could not usurp all my feelings. The purple peaks to the westward and farther inland had a beauty of their own, and in the gentle curves with which they leaned towards each other there was a promise of the flowery meadows of Enna....

Catania presented a lovely picture as we drew near its harbor. Planted at the very foot of Etna, it has a background such as neither Naples nor Genoa can boast. The hills next the sea are covered with gardens and orchards, sprinkled with little villages and the country-places of the nobles,—a rich, cultured landscape, which gradually merges into the forests of oak and chestnut that girdle the waist of the great volcano. But all the wealth of southern vegetation cannot hide the footsteps of that Ruin, which from time to time visits the soil. Half-way up the mountain-side is dotted with cones of ashes and cinders, some covered with the scanty shrubbery which centuries have called forth, some barren and recent; while two dark, winding streams of sterile lava descend to the very shore, where they stand congealed in ragged needles and pyramids. Part of one of these black floods has swept the town, and, tumbling into the sea, walls one side of the port.

[What shall we say of Catania? It has not dwelt at the foot of Mount Etna with impunity, but has been more than once destroyed. During the week of Mr. Taylor’s visit the centennial festival of St. Agatha, the miracles of whose martyrdom had here their scene, took place. This saint still performs miracles, “and her power is equally efficacious in preventing earthquakes and eruptions of Mount Etna.” The festival was brilliant in illuminations and pyrotechnic displays.]

Truly, except the illumination of the Golden Horn on the Night of Predestination, I have seen nothing equal to the spectacle presented by Catania during the past three nights. The city, which has been built up from her ruins more stately than ever, was in a blaze of light, all her domes, towers, and the long lines of her beautiful palaces revealed in the varying red and golden flames of a hundred thousand lamps and torches. Pyramids of fire, transparencies, and illuminated triumphal arches filled the four principal streets, and the fountain in the cathedral square gleamed like a jet of molten silver, spinning up from one of the pores of Etna. At ten o’clock a gorgeous display of fireworks closed the day’s festivities, but the lamps remained burning nearly all night.

On the second night the grand Procession of the Veil took place. I witnessed the imposing spectacle from the balcony of Prince Gessina’s palace. Long lines of waxen torches led the way, followed by a military band, and then a company of the highest prelates in their most brilliant costumes, surrounding the bishop, who walked under a canopy of silk and gold, bearing the miraculous veil of St. Agatha. I was blessed with a distant view of it, but could see no traces of the rosy hue left upon it by the flames of the saint’s martyrdom....

To-night Signor Scava, the American vice-consul, took me to the palace of Prince Biscari, overlooking the harbor, in order to behold the grand display of fireworks from the end of the mole. The showers of rockets and colored stars, and the temples of blue and silver fire, were repeated in the dark, quiet bosom of the sea, producing the most dazzling and startling effects....

Among the antiquities of Catania which I have visited are the Amphitheatre, capable of holding fifteen thousand persons, the old Greek Theatre, in which Alcibiades made his noted harangue to the Catanians, the Odeon, and the ancient baths. The theatre, which is in tolerable preservation, is built of lava, like many of the modern edifices in the city. The baths proved to me, what I had supposed, that the Oriental bath of the present day is identical with that of the ancients. Why so admirable an institution has never been introduced into Europe is more than I can tell. From the pavement of these baths, which is nearly twenty feet below the surface of the earth, the lava of later eruptions has burst up, in places, in hard black jets. The most wonderful token of that flood which whelmed Catania two hundred years ago is to be seen at the grand Benedictine convent of San Nicola, in the upper part of the city. Here the stream of lava divides itself just before the convent, and flows past on both sides, leaving the buildings and garden untouched. The marble courts, the fountains, the splendid galleries, and the gardens of richest Southern bloom and fragrance stand like an epicurean island in the midst of the terrible stony waves, whose edges bristle with the thorny aloe and cactus....

The noises of the festival had not ceased when I closed my eyes at midnight. I slept soundly through the night, but was awakened before sunrise by my Sicilian landlord. “Oh, Excellenza! have you heard the Mountain? He is going to break out again; may the holy St. Agatha protect us!”

It is rather ill-timed on the part of the Mountain, was my involuntary first thought, that he should choose for a new eruption precisely the centennial festival of the only saint who is supposed to have any power over him. It shows a disregard of female influence not at all suited to the present day, and I scarcely believe that he seriously means it. Next comes along the jabbering landlady: “I don’t like his looks. It was just so the last time. Come, Excellenza, you can see him from the back terrace.”

The sun was not yet risen, but the east was bright with his coming, and there was not a cloud in the sky. All the features of Etna were sharply sculptured in the clear air. From the topmost cone a thick stream of white smoke was slowly puffed out at short intervals, and rolled lazily down the eastern side. It had a heavy, languid character, and I should have thought nothing of the appearance but for the alarm of my hosts. It was like the slow fire of earth’s incense burning on that grand mountain altar.

I hurried off to the post-office to await the arrival of the diligence from Palermo. The office is in the Strada Etnea, the main street of Catania, which runs straight through the city from the sea to the base of the mountain whose peak closes the long vista. The diligence was an hour later than usual, and I passed the time in watching the smoke, which continued to increase in volume, and was mingled, from time to time, with jets of inky blackness. The postilion said he had seen fires and heard loud noises during the night. According to his account, the disturbances commenced about midnight.

At last we rolled out of Catania. There were in the diligence, besides myself, two men and a woman, Sicilians of the secondary class. The road followed the shore, over rugged tracts of lava, the different epochs of which could be distinctly traced in the character of their vegetation. The last great flow (of 1679) stood piled in long ridges of terrible sterility, barely allowing the aloe and cactus to take root in the hollows between. The older deposits were sufficiently decomposed to nourish the olive and vine, but even here the orchards were studded with pyramids of the harder fragments, which are laboriously collected by the husbandmen. In the few favored spots which have been untouched for so many ages that a tolerable depth of soil has accumulated, the vegetation has all the richness and brilliancy of tropical lands. The palm, orange, and pomegranate thrive luxuriantly, and the vines almost break under their heavy clusters. The villages are frequent and well-built, and the hills are studded, far and near, with the villas of rich proprietors, mostly buildings of one story, with verandas extending their whole length. Looking up towards Etna, whose base the road encircles, the views are gloriously rich and beautiful. On the other hand is the blue Mediterranean and the irregular outline of the shore, here and there sending forth promontories of lava, cooled by the waves into the most fantastic forms.

We had not proceeded far before a new sign called my attention to the mountain. Not only was there a perceptible jar or vibration in the earth, but a dull, groaning sound, like the muttering of distant thunder, began to be heard. The smoke increased in volume, and, as we advanced farther to the eastward, and much nearer to the great cone, I perceived that it consisted of two jets issuing from different mouths. A broad stream of very dense white smoke still flowed over the lip of the topmost crater and down the eastern side. As its breadth did not vary, and the edges were distinctly defined, it was no doubt the sulphureous vapor rising from a river of molten lava. Perhaps a thousand yards below a much stronger column of mingled black and white smoke gushed up in regular beats or pants from a depression in the mountain-side, between two small extinct cones. All this part of Etna was scarred with deep chasms, and in the bottoms of those nearest the opening I could see the red gleam of fire. The air was perfectly still, and as yet there was no cloud in the sky.

When we stopped to change horses at the town of Aci Reale, I first felt the violence of the tremor and the awful sternness of the sound. The smoke by this time seemed to be gathering on the side towards Catania, and hung in a dark mass about half-way down the mountain. Groups of the villagers were gathered in the streets which looked upward to Etna and discussing the chances of an eruption. “Ah,” said an old peasant, “the Mountain knows how to make himself respected. When he talks, everybody listens.” The sound was the most awful that ever met my ears. It was a hard, painful moan, now and then fluttering like a suppressed sob, and had, at the same time, an expression of threatening and of agony. It did not come from Etna alone. It had no fixed location; it pervaded all space. It was in the air, in the depths of the sea, in the earth under my feet, everywhere, in fact; and as it continued to increase in violence I experienced a sensation of positive pain. The people looked anxious and alarmed, although they said it was a good thing for all Sicily; the last year they had been in constant fear from earthquakes, and an eruption invariably left the earth quiet for several years. It is true that during the past year parts of Sicily and Calabria have been visited with severe shocks, occasioning much damage to property. A merchant of this city [Messina] informed me yesterday that his whole family had slept for two months in the vaults of his warehouse, fearing that their residence might be shaken down in the night.

As we rode along from Aci Reale to Taormina, all the rattling of the diligence over the rough road could not drown the awful noise. There was a strong smell of sulphur in the air, and the thick pants of smoke from the lower crater continued to increase in strength. The sun was fierce and hot, and the edges of the sulphureous clouds shone with a dazzling whiteness. A mounted soldier overtook us, and rode beside the diligence, talking with the postilion. He had been up to the mountain, and was taking his report to the governor of the district.

The heat of the day and the continued tremor of the air lulled me into a sort of doze, when I was suddenly aroused by a cry from the soldier and the stopping of the diligence. At the same time there was a terrific peal of sound, followed by a jar that must have shaken the whole island. We looked up to Etna, which was fortunately in full view before us. An immense mass of snow-white smoke had burst up from the crater, and was rising perpendicularly into the air, the rounded volumes rapidly whirling one over the other, yet urged with such impetus that they only rolled outward after they had ascended to an immense height. It might have been one minute or five, for I was so entranced by this wonderful spectacle that I lost the sense of time, but it seemed instantaneous (so rapid and violent were the effects of the explosion), when there stood in the air, based on the summit of the mountain, a mass of smoke four or five miles high, and shaped precisely like the Italian pine-tree.

Words cannot paint the grandeur of this mighty tree. Its trunk of columned smoke, one side of which was silvered by the sun, while the other, in shadow, was lurid with red flame, rose for more than a mile before it sent out its cloudy boughs. Then parting into a thousand streams, each of which again threw out its branching tufts of smoke, rolling and waving in the air, it stood in intense relief against the dark blue of the sky. Its rounded masses of foliage were dazzlingly white on one side, while, in the shadowy depths of the branches, there was a constant play of brown, yellow, and crimson tints, revealing the central shaft of fire. It was like the tree celebrated in the Scandinavian sagas, as seen by the mother of Harold Hardrada,—that tree whose roots pierced through the earth, whose trunk was of the color of blood, and whose branches filled the uttermost corners of the heavens.

The outburst seemed to have relieved the mountain, for the tremors were now less violent, though the terrible noise still droned in the air, and earth, and sea. And now, from the base of the tree, three white streams slowly crept into as many separate chasms, against the walls of which played the flickering glow of the burning lava. The column of smoke and flame was still hurled upward, and the tree, after standing about ten minutes,—a new and awful revelation of the active forces of nature,—gradually rose and spread, lost its form, and, slowly moved by a light wind (the first that disturbed the dead calm of the day), bent over to the eastward.

We resumed our course. The vast belt of smoke at last arched over the strait, here about twenty miles wide, and sank towards the distant Calabrian shore. As we drove under it, for some miles of our way, the sun was totally obscured, and the sky presented the singular spectacle of two hemispheres of clear blue, with a broad belt of darkness drawn between them. There was a hot, sulphureous vapor in the air, and showers of white ashes fell from time to time. We were distant about twelve miles, in a straight line, from the crater, but the air was so clear, even under the shadow of the smoke, that I could distinctly trace the downward movement of the rivers of lava.

This was the eruption, at last, to which all the phenomena of the morning had been only preparatory. For the first time in ten years the depths of Etna had been stirred, and I thanked God for my detention at Malta, and the singular hazard of travel which had brought me here, to his very base, to witness a scene the impression of which I shall never lose to my dying day. Although the eruption may continue, and the mountain pour forth fiercer fires and broader tides of lava, I cannot but think that the first upheaval, which lets out the long-imprisoned forces, will not be equalled in grandeur by any later spectacle.

After passing Taormina, our road led us under the hills of the coast, and although I occasionally caught glimpses of Etna, and saw the reflection of fire from the lava which was filling up his savage ravines, the smoke at last encircled his waist, and he was then shut out of sight by the intervening mountains. We lost a bolt in the deep valley opening to the sea, and during our stoppage I could still hear the groans of the mountain, though farther off and less painful to the ear. As evening came on, the beautiful hills of Calabria, with white towns and villages on their sides, gleamed in the purple light of the setting sun. We drove around headland after headland, till the strait opened, and we looked over the harbor of Messina to Cape Faro and the distant islands of the Tyrrhene Sea.

[ PLEBEIAN LIFE IN VENICE.]

HORACE ST. JOHN.

[Venice is not all made up of palaces and patricians, not all bronze and marble, pictures and statuary. Out of the range of all this, unseen by the ordinary traveller, lies another and humbler Venice, where the poor pass their straitened lives, but which has a character and attraction of its own, worthy of being seen and described. We give St. John’s story of discovery in this realm of what he calls “vulgar Venice.”]

It may not be a discovery, but it is a fact not often noticed, that there is an every-day Venice which is decidedly vulgar,—which means that it is not all Rialto, Bridge of Sighs, Grand Canal, or Doge’s Palace. But, to judge from poems, pictures, and tourists, the city is one beautiful dream, of marble and bronze, of jasper and vermilion, of pictures and the sculptor’s breathing models. The temptation is, no doubt, seducing to pass all your time where the great columns stand, where the bronze horses, near St. Mark’s, glow with all the colors of the sunset, and where that strangely composed young girl shows you through the horrible labyrinths of the state prison.

Yet there is another Venice which artists rarely touch, as if all low life were confined to the Low Countries, where they are eager enough to sketch fish-stalls and kitchens by the light of “single candle” Schendel. And this Venice has not a solitary element of romance or beauty about it. Step into the “omnibus gondola”—the very thought is enough to obliterate an epic of enthusiasm—and it will land you where the Venetians lead their common lives, without any Byron to bewail them. The songless gondoliers of these public boats are a miserable set of folk. They never save anything; their fathers never saved anything before them; but they keep up their spirits notwithstanding. Thus, between Giacomo passing Beppo, “Good luck to you!” “Thanks!” “Be hanged, you and your thanks!” Or, “Many patrons?” “Many.” “You and your patrons be hanged!” These affectionate greetings are universal.

But the grimy gondola has stopped, and the buying and selling quarter has been reached. No stately ladies, or very few, here “serpentining,” as Balzac says, whatever he may mean, along the pavement, and not too many of the white-bodiced damsels, who look so graceful on canvas, as if they were always clean and dark Madonnas into the bargain; because, to tell the truth, these ladies are accustomed, in warm weather, to lay aside those pretty bodices, and work in an attire at once more light and more loose. They are exceedingly busy, and the scene is wonderfully animated.

Venice, providing its dinner, has been compared with a huge ship in port, taking in provisions. Padua and Vicenza have brought their corn and oil; the islands have sent their indescribably superb fruit; Friuli, Istria, Illyria, and the Turkish Archipelago contribute grain, meat, game, conserves, and pickles; Austria, Hungary, and Dalmatia supply wine, which is diluted, by the humbler sort of consumers, with sea water, which the “stick girls,” so called from the yokes they carry on their shoulders, bring about. They are from Friuli, whose snow-white summits are just visible from here,—and striking enough they are in their bright bodices, short blue or green skirts, with red borders, and white Calabrian hats, daintily tipped on one side, in order that the massive gold hair ornaments or polished steel pins may be admired. But these charming water-carriers are despised; they live apart from the other inhabitants; and not a Venetian will ever marry one of them. Still, they often return to their mountains, tolerably rich, and their Titian faces are quite as proud with scorn of the Venetians as those of Venetians are for them.

However, it is market-time, which must not be wasted upon international antipathies. Nearly everything in Venice is sold, and nearly everything eatable is eaten, among the inferior classes, in the open air,—polenta, beef, mutton, fish, frying, grilling, roasting, and perpetually passing hot into the hands of the al fresco customers. It is generally very good; but best of all is the bread made “on the Continent” expressly for Venice, in the incomparable little district of Piava. Armed with a “tasting order,” which a few of the smallest coins imaginable will command, you pass through the hungry throng. This is soup, by no means bad, at two-thirds of a half-penny the basin. That is calves’-head; these are lamb- and pork-chops, with heart and tripe, the savor whereof is suggestive of ancient sacrifices.

Some of the people keep stalls; others shops, without doors or windows. It appears odd to a stranger, upon entering a wine-hall, to be offered a plateful of highly-salted mutton, a comestible which everybody appears to be devouring. After it a service of fish, the entire flavor of which has been absorbed in brine. Then you are ready to drink; but the wine is salted also! There are two delicacies, however, in which persons of every degree delight, and which induce the denizens of the opulent quarter to bring their nobility here. The first is a small white biscuit, made of the most exquisite flour and fresh butter, so speckless, light, and fragile that they crumble at a rough touch, and will not keep longer than twelve hours. Who wants to feast upon them, then, must come to the oven, and, tenderly handling the bianchetti, dip them in the wine of Cyprus, and believe in solid ambrosia. The second rarity—uniqueness I would say, if there were such a word—is a little fish, fried in oil, which is sold from morning till night, all through the season. You shall see a maiden of Venice, gloved like a Parisian, “well knotted,” elegant of costume, and in air patrician, buy two pennyworth of these dainties,—the whitebait of Italy,—smelling of oil, fire, and the frying-pan, wrap them in paper, take them to a cabaret, sit down, and relish them unmistakably over a flask of Cyprus. She is never alone, however, but accompanied by an escort, who is stamped a gentleman by that sign infallible in Venice, whether or not it be so elsewhere,—his dress. At the same table may be seated, possibly, the very fisherman who provided the banquet.

But what is the meaning of the phrase just used, “well knotted”? Let her wear the richest silk ever spun in Italy, and the haughtiest Hungarian hat, with its aigrette of a dove’s wing, your Venetian lady of blue blood is not distinguishable, except by what she has upon her neck. And this is a gold chain, of apparently countless links, beautifully brilliant, with that reddish tinge which has so often been the perplexity of painters, though Titian mastered it, as he did everything else; and falling from the throat is gathered in a coil at the waist, where, the larger and heavier the knot, the higher the patent of social splendor.

Though I am not concerned at present with the aristocracy of the sea-born city, still, if lofty dames will eat little fishes in a market-place, they cannot complain of personalities, should the remark be made that some are dark as ever Giorgione or Carpaccio painted; while others, to borrow the ejaculation of a rapturous wanderer from Paris, who was not really in a rapture, and who, of course, did not mean what he was saying, might be mistaken for the daughters of Aurora, a contrast reminding you of Adam’s two wives in the Talmud.

But madame has finished her gouter, and, once more taking a liberty with my Frenchman, I remark that she “undulates always with an appearance of perfect satisfaction.” She will not be seen here again until the same freak of appetite seizes her. For, as a rule, the lower classes—as, indeed, they do everywhere—have their own neighborhoods to themselves, though in Venice, naturally, owing to the peculiarity of its position, there are subdivisions. The workmen and artificers and traders are quite distinct from the boatmen and fishermen, upon whom they look with contempt, and with whom they were formerly in a state of incessant feud. The former wear red caps and belts; the belts and caps of the latter are entirely either black or blue, the capes having tassels of the same color, which give an Oriental character to a Venetian crowd.

THE CHURCH OF ST. MARK, VENICE

And here a curious point occurs. Your great lady prides herself upon the knot in her gold chain; your fisherman or ferryman wears a scarf round his neck, and the bigger the knot he can tie the prouder he is of himself. Again, the gondoliers have their grades of rank. The lords of the black “water broughams,” as some one very much in want of a smart saying termed them, are in the service of private families, and hold themselves ready for orders like coachmen. The second degree is composed—to carry on the analogy—of the canal cabmen, who live upon chance, upon travellers, and upon Romeos and Juliets, whenever these young persons are engaged in adventure. Lastly, there are the gondoliers with fixed stations and fixed destinations, ferrymen who float to and fro. But they are all very important to Venice. They are the links of its life; for, singularly enough, it has not bridges enough, and in this respect is utterly unlike Amsterdam, with which it is so often and so absurdly compared. If, however, they swear at one another, they swear at the railway in a chorus. It is rarely, in these days, that any good luck befalls them. Now and then, to be sure, a music and singing party, dizzy with the juice of the Dalmatian grape, attempt to wake the echoes of Tasso among the lagoons, or two fond fools, fresh from their nuptials in the north, glide over the moonlit sea, regardless of expense, and look at life through the stars; yet such Jessica evenings are few and far between, and the Venetian gondoliers, seen by daylight, look like anything rather than Fenimore Cooper’s hero, or even a daub in a Canaletti canvas. Still, his ancient art has not deserted him, and he can push his craft along at a wonderful speed.

There is one peculiarity about them which the stranger does not readily understand. They speak as though their language was as limpid as the water on which they live, and made up almost entirely of vowels. You wish to be set ashore at the steps of the “Luna” hotel? Certainly; your gondolier knows the “Una” hotel perfectly well. He has another characteristic, not quite so uncommon: he is an unblushing cheat. His Venetian customers pay him tenpence, when you, being a stranger, must pay him half a crown, which is an Italian method of expressing patriotism, I suppose. Yet he is continually to be found upon his knees before the altar, and has a patron of his own, whom he invokes upon every necessary or unnecessary occasion.

From him I turn for a moment to another type,—the ciceroni,—only, however, to mention a single example. She was a young girl who undertook to show the visitor, fresh from the glories of the ducal palace, through the black labyrinths of the ducal prison. She took two wax tapers, lighted them, gave him one, keeping the other herself, and jingled a great bunch of keys. Then the really pretty and graceful maiden led the way down a worn, slippery, dark staircase, up another across the Bridge of Sighs, down again, telling all the way fearful legends of the place, and plunged deeper into the shadowy recesses at every step.

“Are you not afraid?” she is asked.

“A Venetian girl feels no fear,” is her answer.

That is a terrible interior, however, with its range upon range of hideous cells; but worst of all is a vault, without a spark of natural light in it, which seems as if dug in the rock. Its roof is stained by lampblack; its walls bear traces of clamps and chains. “Here the secret executions took place; here the son of a doge was beheaded for daring to love a foreign lady. Only great criminals—that is, great lords—were put to death here.” I wonder whether this tender turnkey, if she had prisoners under her charge, would be pitiless to them. There is something painful in the contrast between such a gaol and such a gaoler.

Leaving her, you pass across the square with its corner group of beggars, its swarm of bare-headed children, its clusters of boys with their hair flowing wild, and their brown necks and chests exposed, who give you an idea that they are expecting their photographs to be taken, but who, nevertheless, bake themselves in the sun languidly enough, and act upon the national maxim, “bisogna stare allegro.” There is but a solitary influence which can rouse your true Venetian to a state of excitement, and that is the presence of death. Rich or poor, he hates it; rich, he rides or rows away to the farthest possible distance; poor, he hides, if he can, until the object of his abhorrence is removed. Somehow these vagrants of the island city never starve. They earn, by one means or another, sufficient for the day, which signifies sufficient for dinner,—two pennyworth of fish, ready cooked, as already described; one pennyworth of soup, and one of bread; and it may be suspected that women and girls do a principal part of whatever work is done in Venice at all.

You turn into a sequestered nook, resembling one of the smaller courts opening upon Fleet Street, and a number of damsels, without dulcimers, are chattering or singing. These are the pearl-threaders, for pearl-threading is a universal occupation, just as embroidery was at one time in England. The wealthy do it for amusement, the humbler classes for gain, of which, as I have said, a very little goes a long way. It is a popular saying, “You may die of love or hatred in Venice, but not of hunger;” still, you see many ragged, hollow-eyed, and pallid wretches, who, in former days, might have been mistaken for lottery-hunters; but those times, happily, have passed away, though they presented a spectacle sufficiently interesting four or five years ago....

Some one has compared Venice to a page of music, with its curious streets, palaces, museums, canals, and bridges; resembling lines, notes, double notes, points, crotchets, pauses; its long and straight, its short, narrow and crooked ways; its open spaces scattered up and down; its mounting and descending of bridges. I cannot myself see the truth of the comparison; but so much may be readily admitted,—that the stranger can easily lose his way, and not easily find it again, in this maze of land and water, worse than Amsterdam. Unless, however, the wanderer has some business on hand, the very best way to see Venice is to be lost in it; because then, instead of the regulation round of sights, a thousand unexpected novelties strike the eye, in the narrow, ill-paved, and generally noiseless streets that intersect the islands, though the hoof of a horse or rumbling of a wheel is never heard in them.

Opening upon these dingy and tortuous thoroughfares are many of those back entrances to the mansions of the opulent, which play so prominent a part in romance and drama, though, as a rule, they are inhabited by the poorest of the poor to whom an abode is a retreat, not a home,—since their lives are habitually passed out of doors. As for furniture, a bedstead and a huge chest or coffer, with a stool or two, and a small but solid table, constitute the inventory,—if exception be made of the bowls, and spoons, and bread-knives which the inmates carry abroad when they intend to banquet beneath that sky in which Tintoretto and Veronese exulted.

Nothing of marble or mosaic here; nothing of gold or purple; only squalor, such as is never seen in a town of Holland; such as is seldom met with, indeed, anywhere out of Ireland or Italy. The water, however, mingles so intricately with the land that it is impossible to go many steps without coming upon a bridge and a canal,—not the canal of the artist, all blue except where richer tints are reflected by the architecture on either side, but narrow, crooked, overhung by ugly houses, and rather less sweet to the nostrils than becomes a city famous for its love of violets. Hither come the itinerants of the public places when the last loiterers have left the square of St. Mark’s and there is no longer a chance of selling fried cakes or fish, salt mutton or salt tripe, mock pearls or gold thread to string them upon; and here my glimpse closes upon Venice, a thousand times described, yet rarely, I think, from this particular point of view.

[ ATHENS AND ITS TEMPLES.]

J. L. T. PHILLIPS.

[To say anything concerning the claims of Athens to the traveller’s attention would be but a waste of words. For the student of art and architecture it will long remain a place of pilgrimage. We reproduce here such a student’s story of a visit to the antiquities of Athens. It is the ancient city of which he speaks; modern Athens has far less to commend it to attention.]

The day is a happy one to the student-traveller from the Western World in which he first looks upon the lovely plain of Athens. Rounding the point where Hymettus thrusts his huge length into the sea, the long, featureless mountain-wall of Southern Attica suddenly breaks down, and gives place to a broad expanse of fertile and well-cultivated soil, sloping gently back with ever-narrowing bounds until it reaches the foot-hills of lofty Pentelicus. The wooded heights of Parnes enclose it on the north, while bald Hymettus rears an impassable barrier along the south. In front of the gently recurved shore stretch the smooth waters of the Gulf of Salamis, while beyond rises range upon range of lofty mountain-peaks with strikingly varied outline, terminating on the one hand in the towering cone of Egina, and on the other in the pyramidal, fir-clad summit of Cithæron.

Upon the plain, at the distance of three or four miles from the sea, are several small rocky hills of picturesque appearance, isolated and seemingly independent, but really parts of a low range parallel to Hymettus. Upon one of the most considerable of these, whose precipitous sides make it a natural fortress, stood the Acropolis, and upon the group of lesser heights around and in the valleys between clustered the dwellings of ancient Athens.

It was a fitting site for the capital of a people keenly sensitive to beauty, and destined to become the leaders of the world in matters of taste, especially in the important department of the Fine Arts. Nowhere are there more charming contrasts of mountain, sea, and plain,—nowhere a more perfect harmony of picturesque effect. The sea is not a dreary waste of waters without bounds, but a smiling gulf mirroring its mountain-walls and winding about embosomed isles, yet ever broadening as it recedes, and suggesting the mighty flood beyond from which it springs. The plain is not an illimitable expanse over which the weary eye ranges in vain in quest of some resting-place, but is so small as to be embraced in its whole contour in a single view, while its separate features—the broad, dense belt of olives which marks the bed of its principal stream, the ancient Cephisus, the vineyards, the grain-fields, and the sunny hill-side pastures—are made to produce their full impression. The mountains are not near enough to be obtrusive, much less oppressive; neither are they so distant as to be indistinct or to seem insignificant. Seen through the clear air, their naked summits are so sharply defined and so individual in appearance as to seem almost like sculptured forms chiselled out of the hard rock....

So the student-pilgrim from the Western World with native ardor strains his sight to catch the first glimpse of the Athenian plain and city. He is fresh from his studies, and familiar with what books teach of the geography of Greece and the topography of Athens. He needs not to be informed which mountain-range is Parnes, and which Pentelicus,—which island is Salamis, and which Egina. Yet much of what he sees is a revelation to him. The mountains are higher, more varied, and more beautiful than he had supposed, Lycabettus and the Acropolis more imposing, Pentelicus farther away, and the plain larger, the gulf narrower, and Egina nearer and more mountainous, than he had fancied. He is astonished at the smallness of the harbor at Peiræus, having insensibly formed his conception of its size from the notices of the mighty fleets which sailed from it in the palmy days when Athens was mistress of the seas. He is not prepared to see the southern shore of Salamis so near to the Peiræus, though it explains the close connection between that island and Athens, and throws some light upon the great naval defeat of the Persians. In short, while every object is recognized as it presents itself, yet a more correct conception is formed of its relative position and aspect from a single glance of the eye than had been acquired from books during years of study.

Arrived at the city, his experience is the same. He needs no guide to conduct him to its antiquities, nor cicerone to explain in bad French or worse English their names and history. Still, unexpected appearances present themselves not unfrequently. Hastening towards the

Acropolis, he will first inspect the remains of the great theatre of Dionysus, so familiar to him as the place where, in the presence of all the people and many strangers, were acted the plays of his favorite poets, Æschylus and Sophocles, and where they won many prizes. Hurrying over the eastern brow of the hill, he comes suddenly upon the spot, enters at the summit, as many an Athenian did in the olden time, and is smitten with amazement at the first glance, and led to question whether this be indeed the site of the ancient theatre. He finds, it is true, the topmost seats cut in the solid rock, row above row, stripped now of their marble lining and weather-worn, but yet the genuine ancient seats of the upper tier. These he expected to find. But whence are those fresh seats which fill the lower part of the hollow, arranged as neatly as if intended for immediate use? and whence the massive stage beyond? He bethinks himself that he has heard of recent excavations under the patronage of the government, and closer inspection shows that these are actually the lower seats of the theatre in the time of the emperor Hadrian, whose favorite residence was Athens, and who did so much to embellish the city. The front seats consist of massive stone chairs, each inscribed with the name of its occupant, generally the priestess of some one of the numerous gods worshipped by that people so given to idolatry. In the centre of the second row is an elevated throne inscribed with the name of Hadrian. The stage is seen to be the ancient Greek stage enlarged to the Roman size to suit the demands of a later style of theatrical representation.

After looking in vain for the seat occupied by the priestess of the Unknown God, our traveller passes on and enters with a beating heart the charmed precincts of the Acropolis itself. The Propylæa, which he has been accustomed to regard too exclusively as a mere entrance-gate to the glories beyond, impresses him with its size and grandeur, and the little temple of Victory by its side with its elegance. But the steepness of the ascent perplexes him. It seems impracticable for horses, yet he knows by unexceptionable testimony that the Athenian youth prided themselves upon driving their matched steeds in the great Panathenaic procession which once every four years wound up the hill, bearing the sacred peplus to the temple of the goddess. A closer examination reveals the transverse creases of the pavement designed to give a footing to the beasts, as well as the marks of the chariot-wheels. Nevertheless, the ascent (and much more the descent) must have been a perilous undertaking, unless the teams were better broken than the various accounts of chariot-races furnished by the poets would indicate.

Entering beneath the great gate, a little distance forward to the left may readily be found the site of the colossal bronze statue of the warrior-goddess in complete armor, formed by Phidias out of the spoils taken at Marathon. The square base, partly sunk in the uneven rock, is as perfect as if just put in readiness to receive the pedestal of that famous work. A road bending to the right and slightly hollowed out of the rock leads to the Parthenon. The outer platform which sustains this celebrated temple is partly cut from the rock of the hill and partly built up of common limestone. The inner one of three courses, as well as the whole superstructure, is formed of Pentelic marble of a compact crystalline structure and of dazzling whiteness. Long exposure has not availed to destroy its lustre, but only to soften its tone. The visitor, planting himself at the western front, is in a position to gain some adequate idea of the perfection of the noble building. The interior and central parts suffered the principal injury from the explosion of the Turkish powder magazine in 1687. The western front remains nearly entire. It has been despoiled, indeed, of its movable ornaments. The statues which filled the pediment are gone, with the exception of a fragment or two. The sculptured slabs have been removed from the spaces between the triglyphs, and the gilded shields which hung beneath have been taken down. Of the magnificent frieze, representing the procession of the great quadrennial festival, only the portion surrounding the western vestibule is still in place. Still, as these were strictly decorations, and wholly subordinate to the organic parts of the structure, their presence, while it would doubtless greatly enhance the effect of the whole, is not felt to be essential to its completeness. The whole Doric columns still bear the massive entablature sheltered by the covering roof. The simple greatness of the conception, the just proportion of the several parts, together with the elaborate finishing of the whole work, invest it with a charm such as the works of man seldom possess,—the pure and lasting pleasure which flows from apparent perfection.

Entering the principal apartment of the building, traces are seen of the stucco and pictures with which the walls were covered when it was fitted up as a Christian church in the Byzantine period. Near the centre of the marble pavement is a rectangular space laid with dark stone from the Peiræus or from Eleusis. It marks the probable site of the colossal precious statue of the goddess in gold and ivory,—one of the most celebrated works of Phidias. The smaller apartment beyond, accessible only from the opposite front of the temple, was used by the state as a place of deposit and safe-keeping for bullion and other valuables in the care of the state treasurer.

Having examined the great temple, and tested the curvature of its seemingly horizontal lines by sighting along the unencumbered platform, and having stopped at several points of the grand portico to admire the fine views of the city and surrounding country, the traveller picks his way northward, across a thick layer of fragments of columns, statues, and blocks of marble, towards the low-placed, irregular, but elegant Erechtheum, the temple of the most ancient worship and statue of the patron-goddess of the city. This building sits close by the northern as the Parthenon does by the southern wall of the enclosure. It has suffered equally with the other from the ravages of time, and its ruins, though less grand, are more beautiful. Most of the graceful Ionic columns are still standing, but large portions of the roof and entablature have fallen. Fragments of decorated cornice strew the ground, some of them of considerable length, and afford a near view of that delicate ornamentation and exquisite finish so rare outside the limits of Greece.

ACROPOLIS AT ATHENS, GREECE

The elevated porch of the Caryatides, lately restored by the substitution of a new figure in place of the missing statue now in the British Museum, attracts attention as a unique specimen of Greek art, and also as showing how far a skilful treatment will overcome the inherent difficulties of a subject. The row of fair maidens looking out towards the Parthenon do not seem much oppressed by the burden which rests upon them, while their graceful forms lend a pleasing variety to the scene. Passing out by the northern wing of the Propylæa, a survey is had of the numerous fragments of sculpture discovered among the ruins upon the hill, and temporarily placed in the ancient Pinacotheca. The eye rests upon sweet infant faces and upon rugged manly ones. Sometimes a single feature only remains, which, touched by the finger of genius, awakens admiration. A naked arm severed from the trunk, of feminine cast, but with muscles tightly strained and hand clinched as in agony, will arrest attention and dwell in the memory.

Northwest of the Acropolis, across a narrow chasm, lies the low, rocky height of the Areopagus, accessible at the southeast angle by a narrow flight of sixteen rudely-cut steps, which lead to a small rectangular excavation on the summit, which faces the Acropolis, and is surrounded upon three sides by a double tier of benches hewn out of the rock. Here undoubtedly the most venerable court of justice at Athens had its seat and tried its cases in the open air. Here too, without doubt, stood the great apostle when, with bold spirit and weighty words, he declared unto the men of Athens that God of whom they confessed their ignorance; who was not to be represented by gold or silver or stone graven by art and man’s device; who dwelt not in temples made with hands, and needed not to be worshipped with men’s hands. In no other place can one feel so sure that he comes upon the very footsteps of the apostle, and on no other spot can one better appreciate his high gifts as an orator or the noble devotion of his whole soul to the work of the Master. How poor in comparison with his life-work appear the performances of the greatest of the Athenian thinkers or doers!

A little more than a quarter of a mile west of the Acropolis is another rocky hill,—the Pnyx,—celebrated as the place where the assembly of all the citizens met to transact the business of the state. A large semicircular area was formed, partly by excavation, partly by building up from beneath, the bounds of which can be distinctly traced. Considerable remains of the terrace-wall at the foot of the slope exist,—huge stones twelve or fourteen feet in length by eight or ten in breadth. The chord of the semicircle is near the top of the hill, formed by the perpendicular face of the excavated rock, and is about four hundred feet in length by twenty in depth. Projecting from it at the centre, and hewn out of the same rock, is the bema or stone platform from which the great orators from the time of Themistocles and Aristides, and perhaps of Solon, down to the age of Demosthenes and the Attic Ten, addressed the mass of their fellow-citizens. It is a massive cubic block, with a linear edge of eleven feet, standing upon a graduated base of nearly equal height, and is mounted on either side by a flight of nine stone steps. From its connection with the most celebrated efforts of some of the greatest orators our race has yet seen, it is one of the most interesting relics in the world, and its solid structure will cause it to endure as long as the world itself shall stand, unless, as there is some reason to apprehend will be the case, it is knocked to pieces and carried off in the carpet-bags of travellers. No traces of the Agora, which occupied the shallow valley between the Pnyx and the Acropolis, remain. It was the heart of the city, and was adorned with numerous public buildings, porticoes, temples, and statues. It was often thronged with citizens gathered for purposes of trade, discussion, or to hear and tell some new thing.

Half a mile or more to the southeast, on the banks of the Ilissus, stood a magnificent structure dedicated to Olympian Zeus,—one of the four largest temples of Greece, ranking with that of Demeter at Eleusis and that of Diana at Ephesus. Its foundations remain, and sixteen of the huge Corinthian columns belonging to its majestic triple colonnade. One of these is fallen. Breaking up into the numerous disks of which it was composed,—six and a half feet in diameter by two or more in thickness,—and stretching out to a length of over sixty feet, it gives an impressive conception of the size of these columns, said to be the largest standing in Europe. The level area of the temple is now used as a training-ground for soldiers. Close by, and almost in the bed of the stream, which is dry the larger part of the year, issues from beneath a ledge of rock the copious fountain of sweet waters known to the ancients as Callirrhoe. It furnished the only good drinking-water of the city, and was used in all the sacrifices to the gods. A little way above, on the opposite bank of the Ilissus, is the site of the Panathenaic stadium, whose shape is perfectly preserved in the smooth grass-grown hollow with semicircular extremity which here lies at right angles to the stream, between parallel ridges partly artificial.

Northward from the Acropolis, on a slight elevation, is the best-preserved and one of the most ancient structures of Athens,—the temple of Theseus, built under the administration of Cimon by the generation preceding Pericles and the Parthenon. It is of the Doric order, and shaped like the Parthenon, but considerably inferior to it in size as well as in execution. It has been roofed with wood in modern times, and was long used as a church, but is now a place of deposit for the numerous statues and sculptured stones of various kinds—mostly sepulchral monuments—which have been recently discovered in and about the city. They are for the most part unimportant as works of art, though many are interesting from their antiquity or historic associations. Among these is the stone which once crowned the burial-mound on the plain of Marathon. It bears a single figure, said to represent the messenger who brought the tidings of victory to his countrymen.

Near the Theseium was the double gate (Dipylum) in the ancient wall of the city whence issued the Sacred Way leading to Eleusis, and bordered, like the Appian Way at Rome, with tombs, many of them cenotaphs of persons who died in the public service and were deemed worthy of a monument in the public burying-ground. Within a few years an excavation has been made through an artificial mound of ashes, pottery, and other refuse emptied out of the city, and a section of a few rods of this celebrated road has been laid bare. The sepulchral monuments are ranged on one side rather thickly, and crowd somewhat closely upon the narrow pavement. They are, for the most part, simple, thick slabs of white marble, with a triangular or pediment-shaped top, beneath which is sculptured in low relief the closing scene of the person commemorated, followed by a short inscription. The work is done in an artistic style worthy of the publicity its location gave it. On one of these slabs you recognize the familiar full-length figure of Demosthenes, standing with two companions and clasping in a parting grasp the hand of a woman, who is reclining upon her death-bed. The inscription is, Collyrion, wife of Agathon. On another stone of larger size is a more imposing piece of sculpture. A horseman fully armed is thrusting his spear into the body of his fallen foe,—a hoplite. The inscription relates that the unhappy foot-soldier fell at Corinth by reason of those five words of his!—a record intelligible enough, doubtless, to his contemporaries, but sufficiently obscure and provocative of curiosity to later generations.

There are other noted structures at Athens, such as the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates—the highest type of the Corinthian order of architecture, as the Erechtheum is of the Ionic and the Parthenon of the Doric,—but want of space forbids any further description.

[ THE ISLES OF GREECE.]

HENRY M. FIELD.

[History and poetry alike celebrate the beauty of those charming isles, which fill with their sunny grace and rich fertility the seas of Greece, and on which many of the poets of that song-girdled land were born. No work on general travels can be complete without some description of these celebrated islands, and we select from Dr. H. M. Field’s “The Greek Islands” an appreciative account of their aspect to the modern traveller.]

In the old picture-books there used to be a picture of the Colossus of Rhodes, which stood bestriding an arm of the sea with ships in full sail passing between his mighty legs. Though it was a picture for children, yet to some who are not children the chief association with the island of Rhodes is the place where the Colossus stood; and there are travellers still who come on deck, and look round inquiringly for some fragment of a ruin which should mark the site of that majestic figure. But not a vestige remains. Though “His Highness” lifted his head so proudly, as if he disdained the earth on which he stood, he did not hold it up very long. Pride must have a fall. He did not live even to the allotted age of man. He had been standing but fifty-six when an earthquake shook him down, and for nearly a thousand years he lay like Dagon, prone upon the ground, with all his glory buried in the dust, his disjecta membra being trodden underfoot by the barbarous Turk, till at last they were sold to a Jew(!), who broke them up as men break up the hull of an old ship, and, packing them on the backs of nine hundred camels, carried them away. Such was the ignominious end of one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

But though the Colossus did not stand long, the mere fact of its standing at all—that a figure over a hundred feet high, wrought in bronze, like the column of Trajan at Rome, should have been reared nearly three hundred years before Christ—is a proof of the degree of civilization attained at that early period. It was a statue to the sun, and stood in front of the city, where its head would catch the first rays of the sunlight as it came over the hills of Asia Minor, which lay on the eastern horizon.

Rhodes is second to Cyprus (if it be second) in antiquity, and its civilization may be traced to the same sources. Its position at the mouth of the Ægean Sea, whose waters here mingle with those of the Mediterranean, invited immigration both from Asia and Africa. The Phœnicians, sailing westward, landed on its shores; while from farther south men of another race brought to it the wisdom of the Egyptians. At the same time, as one of the islands of the Greek Archipelago, it shared in the intellectual influences of Greece. It stood “where two seas met,” or two civilizations. Like the Channel Islands, which look upon two kingdoms, it was joined by a chain of islands to Greece, while it was in full sight of Asia, to which it was nearer than the white chalk cliffs of Dover to the shores of France. Probably the island was settled as early as the siege of Troy, though the city was not founded until about four hundred years before Christ.

It was in the century following that Alexander the Great conquered the world, and Rhodes bowed to a power which it could not resist, and was held in awe by the terror of his name, even while he was pursuing his conquests in the heart of Asia. But as soon as he breathed his last the spell was broken. The people rose against the Macedonian garrison, and drove them out, and with recovered liberty came new and increased prosperity, and the city rose to its greatest splendor. Then was reared the mighty Colossus; and then sculptors who rivalled those of Greece filled the city with the products of their art. It was said to contain not less than three thousand statues. The famous group of the Farnese Bull—the largest antique sculpture which has been preserved to us, and which, having once adorned the baths of Caracalla at Rome, is now the pride of the museum at Naples—was the work of two sculptors of Rhodes. Such noble statues, adorning the public places of the city, showed that in the cultivation of art Rhodes, if not the equal, was at least a worthy imitator, of Athens itself.

All this has passed away. But though despoiled of its treasures; though the conquerors, who

“Brought many captives home to Rome,”

brought the sculptures of Rhodes with those of Greece; yet the island itself remains, fair as when it first rose from the bosom of the Ægean Sea. Never was it fairer than this morning, as the sunrise, flashing across the blue waters, lighted up the gray old town, with its walls and towers, which stand out from a background of hills. The island rises abruptly from the sea. Beyond the walls of the town houses are sprinkled over the hill-sides, that are covered with olive-groves, which at this season are fresh and green. Behind these lower hills are others that are higher, whose steep sides and rocky crests reminded our good Dr. Wylie of Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags.

The chief remains of historic interest are those connected with the Crusaders, when the island was ruled by the Knights of St. John, who took it, however, not in the advance to the Holy Land, but in the retreat. When they were driven out of Syria by Saladin, they fell back upon Rhodes, which they conquered from the Saracens, and held for over two hundred years,—from 1309 to 1522,—when Solyman the Magnificent came against it with two hundred thousand men. Then followed a siege in which men took courage from despair. The city had a garrison of but six thousand men; yet for six months, in spite of repeated assaults, it defied the besiegers,—a courage which compelled the respect of the conqueror, who after the city fell permitted its brave defenders to retire in safety. A few years later the Emperor Charles V. gave them the island of Malta, which they fortified till it was one of the strongest places in the world, and held it till the close of the last century.

No doubt to us, in this practical and prosaic age, there is something fantastic and absurd in the institution of the Knights of St. John, an order in which the profession of arms was strongly united with the profession of religion. But was it so very absurd, in an age full of oppression and cruelty, that manly strength and courage should be devoted to the protection of women against brutal tyranny? For such was the purpose of the institution of chivalry, which figures so much in the Middle Ages, where it often supplied the place of a civilized government. Or when the Moslem conquered Western Asia and threatened Europe, was it strange that men devoted to arms should band together for the defence of their faith? This order of St. John was not made up of carpet knights. No braver men ever fought on bloody fields. Now, indeed, their wars and battles and sieges are over.

“The good Knights are dust,
Their armor rust,
Their souls are with the saints, we trust.”

Though the order still exists, it is not for purposes of war, but of peace. Its only war is against human misery. This, indeed, was always a part of its design. There are few things in history more touching than the solemn vow of those armed knights, which they took “as the servants of the poor and of Christ.” How well that vow has been kept to this day, the traveller may see who visits the Hospital of the Knights of St. John in Beirut. True, the order remains, as it has always been, a very aristocratic one, composed largely of nobles and princes. Its Grand Master is the Emperor of Germany. But when kings and princes care for the poor and the sick, when they found hospitals and seek to relieve human suffering, they deserve the honor and gratitude of mankind.

When these gallant Knights of St. John took their sad farewell of Rhodes, they left behind them traces of their occupation which still remain in the long sea-wall which guards the city’s front, to keep out an enemy as it keeps out the dashing of the waves. This castellated wall is a very picturesque object, as it not only lies along the sea, but turns at either end, winding up the sides of the hill till it has compassed the city round with its lines of defence, which did such valiant service in the memorable siege. But apart from its look of a fortified place, there is nothing warlike in the city of Rhodes. I did not see a single sentinel keeping guard on the walls, nor see a gun mounted, nor hear a drum beat. There was nothing to break the silence of the sleepy old town; and over the wall, which once swarmed with Crusaders, hurling defiance at the besieging Moslems, there are no more formidable demonstrations than those of the windmills, which brandish their long arms against invisible foes.

The “port,” if such it may be called, is a diminutive little loch of water, shut in by a projecting mole, or ledge of rocks, at either end, on which stands a round tower, a picturesque object in the landscape, but not very formidable in case of war. One broadside from a man-of-war would make it a heap of ruins. Indeed, when a fort is converted into a light-house, it seems to abdicate its martial design, and to be devoted to the purposes of peace,—all that it is good for now.

It was tantalizing to lie but two or three hundred yards off, and not be able to land; but there was a high sea, the waves were dashing on the rocks, tossing their white crests in the air, and if we had gone on shore it might be difficult to get off in time for the steamer. So we lay broadside to the town for two or three hours, looking wistfully at the gates we could not enter.

But though we did not go on shore, we had visitors from the shore. The Greek boatmen are at home in any sea, and never miss an opportunity to visit a ship. They came on board to sell little boxes of olive-and lemon-wood, and other small wares, which the passengers purchased as souvenirs of Rhodes.

Apart from these petty traffickers, there was a grand old Turk, who sat gloomily in conversation with one who knew him. He was a pasha who had been high in power in Constantinople, but for some cause lost the favor of the Sultan, and was banished to Rhodes. Whether he was guilty of any crime we knew not, nor did it matter whether he was guilty or innocent. Perhaps he had been too inflexibly honest, and so encountered the ill-favor of the Grand Vizier. In either case he had to suffer. The Turkish rule knows neither justice nor mercy. However, his fate was lighter than that of many. He was not kept a prisoner, shut up in a fortress; there was no chain upon his hand; and yet we could not look upon that sad face without feeling how bitter was the bread of exile.

Leaving the city behind us, we sail along the shores of the island, and are charmed with their picturesque beauty. The long line of elevated coast sweeps in and out, projecting and receding, with bays stretching inland, at the end of which one catches glimpses of soft valleys sloping upward to the hills, behind and above which is the mountain-ridge which forms the backbone of the island. These valleys once supported a large population; but now, under the destructive Turkish rule, it has dwindled till there are not forty thousand left. A few poor villages cling to the hill-sides whose inhabitants live on their small plantations of olives, or derive a scanty living from the sea, from which they gather sponges and coral. But with a better government and increased facilities for agriculture and commerce, there is no reason why Rhodes may not recover something of its former prosperity. Its climate is still the finest in the Mediterranean; the sun shines brightly as ever; and the valleys, spite of all the waste and neglect, still retain their natural fertility. With proper culture, they would yield rich harvests, besides oranges and lemons and citrons, with the figs and raisins, which are now exported so largely from Smyrna; while the olive-trees, which grow abundantly, would pour forth “rivers of oil.”

We are now in the heart of the Greek Archipelago, which has been famed for its beauty from the days of Homer. As we stood in a group on deck, entranced with the swiftly-changing scene, it was natural that we should compare it with our observation in other parts of the world. A couple of our fellow-passengers, who were on their return from the Far East, said that it reminded them of the Inland Sea of Japan. My thoughts turned to the Malayan Archipelago, where the islands hang rich with tropical vegetation, and the seas flash at night with phosphorescent splendor. But with all that is attractive in those groups of islands, I can hardly believe anything to be equal to this Greek Archipelago. It seems to me that no waters can be so beautiful as those of the Ægean Sea, although there are waters of wonderful clearness in our Western Hemisphere, notably those round the Bahamas and the Bermudas.

And then the Greek islands, so many in number, are of all sizes, large and small, from the rocky islet, fit only for a sea-gull’s nest, to an island containing hundreds of square miles. All have the same general character, rising directly from the sea. The coasts are often so rocky that it seems as if a goat could hardly live upon them, and yet midway between the cliffs are little hamlets and patches of cultivation. The outlines of the higher peaks of the islands, broken and jagged, remind us, as they stand up against the sky, of Capri and Ischia in the Bay of Naples, or those African mountains which we saw from the Peninsula of Sinai, on the other side of the Red Sea. Putting all these things together, whatever may be said of the Malayan Archipelago, or of the Inland Sea of Japan, I give my voice for the Greek Archipelago as the most wonderful combination of land and sea, where the most picturesque of islands rise out of the fairest of waters.

CORINTH, GREECE

We did not touch at Patmos. There is nothing to invite a steamer to turn aside from its course to visit it, except it were to gratify the curiosity of travellers. It has no commerce of any kind. Indeed, its few inhabitants have at certain seasons of the year to cross to other islands to procure the means of subsistence. So barren is it that it was chosen by the Roman emperors as a place of banishment, on which prisoners could be confined as to a rock in the ocean. Yet this poor little island has gathered about it a mighty tradition, for it was the place of exile of the last of the Apostles. “I, John, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the Word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ.” Here he wrote the Book of Revelation, and here was erected in the twelfth century a monastery bearing his name. We thought we could just discern the outline of the island and the convent rising above it on the western horizon.

The next morning at daylight we were off Scio, that island of sad and bloody memories. Sixty years ago it was the scene of an event which made the ears of the civilized world to tingle. When the Greek Revolution broke out in 1822 it is said that the people here were reluctant to take part in it, but were stirred up by emissaries from Samos; and, perhaps because Scio had been one of the most prosperous of the Greek islands, it was to be the special mark of Turkish vengeance. A fleet anchored off the town, and without a warning of its terrible fate, soldiers were let loose upon the inhabitants. No age or sex was spared. Not only were men cut down in their homes, but their wives and children with them. Twenty-two thousand were put to the sword, and forty-seven thousand were sold into slavery. But this massacre was not to go unavenged. The Greeks had no ships of war, but they converted old hulks into fire-ships, in which they sailed with the utmost daring into the centre of the Turkish fleet, and setting them on fire, escaped in their boats. The flag-ship was burnt, and the admiral and crew perished in the flames,—a terrible retribution for the massacre of Scio. Since Greek independence was secured, it has partly recovered; but several years since the town was nearly destroyed by an earthquake, so that it seems as if the island were doomed to destruction.

But all over this wreck and ruin shines the brightness of a name that will ever give to it a place in history. It is the reputed birthplace of Homer, and as such cannot be passed by without notice by the traveller.

[From Scio, Dr. Field sailed for Asia Minor, and spent some time among its historic cities. On his return he passed the island of Lesbos, which has long been famous as the home of Sappho and others of the lyric poets of Greece.]

As the afternoon drew on, we were approaching a large island,—the ancient Lesbos, now Mitylene,—and as we were on its eastern side, and the sun was sinking in the west, we were coming under its shadow, and this softer light enabled us to see it better than we could have done in the glare of noonday. The tops of the mountains stood out with wonderful clearness against the sky, while the outline of the coast winding in and out with its headlands and its bays, and the soft green valleys rising from the shore and running upward to the slopes of the hills, gave it an infinite variety and beauty. Clinging to the hill-sides were pretty villages, with groves of oak cultivated for the acorns they yield, which are used for tanning purposes and exported to Europe, while the pine-forests on the mountains furnish timber and pitch.

The valleys are very fertile, and if they are not “covered over with corn,” they have large plantations of fig and other fruit-trees; while the olive-orchards, if they do not pour out “rivers of oil,” yet yield it in such abundance as makes it the chief industry of the island, and furnishes a source of wealth to the thrifty inhabitants. All these varieties of vegetation were now in their perfect bloom, as it was the middle of May, when in the East the earth rejoices in the freshness of spring-time. As we sailed along these shores in the twilight, I wondered if a fairer Arcadia ever rose out of the waters of this troubled world.

The island of Lesbos has an important place in Greek history, even at its most remote period. As early as the siege of Troy it had a large population, and continued to flourish for centuries.