Page:A Picture-book without Pictures and Other Stories (1848).djvu/72

 the doors and the signs which still remain suspended from the shop-fronts; they looked into the basin of the fountains ornamented with shells and conches; but no stream of water leaped upwards; no song resounded from the richly painted chambers, where dogs of bronze guarded the doors. It was the city of the dead; Vesuvius alone still thundered his eternal hymn.

We went to the temple of Venus, which is built of dazzling white marble, with broad steps ascending to its high altar, and a verdant weeping-willow growing between its columns. The air was exquisitely transparent and blue; and in the back-ground towered Vesuvius, black as night: fires ascended from the crater of the mountain like the stem of a pine-tree; the illumined cloud of smoke hung suspended in the stillness of night, like the pine-tree’s crown, but red as blood. Among the strangers there, was a singer, a true and noble being, to whom I had seen homage paid in the greatest cities of Europe. When the party arrived at the amphitheatre, they all seated themselves upon the marble steps, and again, as in former