Page:The last days of Pompeii - Bulwer-Lytton - King.djvu/9



visiting those disinterred remains of an ancient City, which, more perhaps than either the delicious breeze or the cloudless sun, the violet valleys and orange-groves of the South, attract the traveller to the neighborhood of Naples; on viewing, still fresh and vivid, the houses, the streets the temples, the theatres of a place existing in the haughtiest age of the Roman empire—it was not unnatural, perhaps, that a writer who had before labored, however unworthily, in the art to revive and to create, should feel a keen desire to people once more those deserted streets, to repair those graceful ruins, to reanimate the bones which were yet spared to his survey; to traverse the gulf of eighteen centuries, and to wake to a second existence—the City of the Dead!

And the reader will easily imagine how sensibly this desire grew upon one whose task was undertaken in the immediate neighborhood of Pompeii—the sea that once bore her commerce, and received her fugitives, at his feet—and the fatal mountain of Vesuvius, still breathing forth smoke and fire, constantly before his eyes!