Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 12.djvu/350

328 the hope of plunder, has spoilt many a noble monument of ancient art. After descending sixty steps into a pit, by torchlight, you gaze in admiration at the theatre which once stood beneath the open sky, and listen to the guide recounting all that was found there, and carried off.

We entered the museum well recommended, and were well received: nevertheless, we were not allowed to take any drawings. Perhaps on this account we paid the more attention to what we saw, and the more vividly transported ourselves into those long-passed times, when all these things surrounded their living owners, and ministered to the use and enjoyment of life. The little houses and rooms of Pompeii now appeared to me at once more spacious and more confined,—more confined, because I fancied them to myself crammed full of so many precious objects; more spacious, because these very objects could not have been furnished merely as necessaries, but, being decorated with the most graceful and ingenious devices of the imitative arts, must, while they delighted the taste, also have enlarged the mind far beyond what the amplest house-room could ever have done.

One sees here, for instance, a nobly shaped pail, mounted at the top with a highly ornamented edge. When you examine it more closely, you find that this rim rises on two sides, and so furnishes convenient handles by which the vessel may be lifted. The lamps, according to the number of their wicks, are ornamented with masks and mountings, so that each burner illuminates a genuine figure of art. We also saw some high and gracefully slender stands of iron for holding lamps, the pendent burners being suspended with figures of all kinds, which display a wonderful fertility of invention; and as, in order to please and delight the eye, they sway and oscillate, the effect surpasses all description.