Page:Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 - Volume 2.djvu/295

 and our human spirits come forth as after an eclipse; the world revived looks up and resumes its natural healthy appearance.

We have visited Pompeii. A greater extent of the city has been dug out and laid open since I was there before, so that it has now much more the appearance of a town of the dead. You may ramble about and lose yourself in the many streets. Bulwer, too, has peopled its silence. I have been reading his book, and I have felt on visiting the place much more as if really it had been once full of stirring life, now that he has attributed names and possessors to its houses, passengers to its streets. Such is the power of the imagination. It can not only give “a local habitation and a name” to the airy creations of the fancy and the abstract ideas of the mind, but it can put a soul into stones, and hang the vivid interest of our passions and our hopes upon objects otherwise vacant of name or sympathy. Not indeed that Pompeii could be such, but the account of its “Last Days” has cast over it a more familiar garb, and peopled its desert streets with associations that greatly add to their interest.