In the cellar of Diomede’s house, where certain skeletons were
found huddled together, close to the door, the impression of their
bodies on the ashes, hardened with the ashes, and became stamped
and fixed there, after they had shrunk, inside, to scanty bones.
So, in the theatre of Herculaneum, a comic mask, floating on the
stream when it was hot and liquid, stamped its mimic features in it
as it hardened into stone; and now, it turns upon the stranger the
fantastic look it turned upon the audiences in that same theatre
two thousand years ago.
Next to the wonder of going up and down the streets, and in and out
of the houses, and traversing the secret chambers of the temples of
a religion that has vanished from the earth, and finding so many
fresh traces of remote antiquity: as if the course of Time had
been stopped after this desolation, and there had been no nights
and days, months, years, and centuries, since: nothing is more
impressive and terrible than the many evidences of the searching
nature of the ashes, as bespeaking their irresistible power, and
the impossibility of escaping them. In the wine-cellars, they
forced their way into the earthen vessels: displacing the wine and
choking them, to the brim, with dust. In the tombs, they forced
the ashes of the dead from the funeral urns, and rained new ruin
even into them. The mouths, and eyes, and skulls of all the
skeletons, were stuffed with this terrible hail. In Herculaneum,
where the flood was of a different and a heavier kind, it rolled
in, like a sea. Imagine a deluge of water turned to marble, at its
height – and that is what is called ‘the lava’ here.
Some workmen were digging the gloomy well on the brink of which we
now stand, looking down, when they came on some of the stone
benches of the theatre – those steps (for such they seem) at the
bottom of the excavation – and found the buried city of
Herculaneum. Presently going down, with lighted torches, we are
perplexed by great walls of monstrous thickness, rising up between
the benches, shutting out the stage, obtruding their shapeless
forms in absurd places, confusing the whole plan, and making it a
disordered dream. We cannot, at first, believe, or picture to
ourselves, that THIS came rolling in, and drowned the city; and
that all that is not here, has been cut away, by the axe, like
solid stone. But this perceived and understood, the horror and
oppression of its presence are indescribable.
Many of the paintings on the walls in the roofless chambers of both
cities, or carefully removed to the museum at Naples, are as fresh
and plain, as if they had been executed yesterday. Here are
subjects of still life, as provisions, dead game, bottles, glasses,
and the like; familiar classical stories, or mythological fables,
always forcibly and plainly told; conceits of cupids, quarrelling,
sporting, working at trades; theatrical rehearsals; poets reading
their productions to their friends; inscriptions chalked upon the
walls; political squibs, advertisements, rough drawings by
schoolboys; everything to people and restore the ancient cities, in
the fancy of their wondering visitor. Furniture, too, you see, of
every kind – lamps, tables, couches; vessels for eating, drinking,
and cooking; workmen’s tools, surgical instruments, tickets for the
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theatre, pieces of money, personal ornaments, bunches of keys found
clenched in the grasp of skeletons, helmets of guards and warriors;
little household bells, yet musical with their old domestic tones.
The least among these objects, lends its aid to swell the interest
of Vesuvius, and invest it with a perfect fascination. The
looking, from either ruined city, into the neighbouring grounds
overgrown with beautiful vines and luxuriant trees; and remembering
that house upon house, temple on temple, building after building,
and street after street, are still lying underneath the roots of
all the quiet cultivation, waiting to be turned up to the light of
day; is something so wonderful, so full of mystery, so captivating
to the imagination, that one would think it would be paramount, and
yield to nothing else. To nothing but Vesuvius; but the mountain