Chapter IV

The afternoon on which we visited Herculaneum was in melancholy contrast to the day we spent in Pompeii. The lingering summer had at last saddened into something like autumnal gloom, and that blue, blue sky of Naples was overcast. So, this second draught of the spirit of the past had not only something of the insipidity of custom, but brought rather a depression than a lightness to our hearts. There was so little of Herculaneum: only a few hundred yards square are exhumed, and we counted the houses easily on the fingers of one hand, leaving the thumb to stand for the few rods of street that, with its flagging of lava and narrow border of foot-walks, lay between; and though the custodian, apparently moved at our dejection, said that the excavation was to be resumed the very next week, the assurance did little to restore our cheerfulness. Indeed, I fancy that these old cities must needs be seen in the sunshine by those who would feel what gay lives they once led; by dimmer light they are very sullen spectres, and their doom still seems to brood upon them. I know that even Pompeii could not have been joyous that sunless afternoon, for what there was to see of mournful Herculaneum was as brilliant with colors as any thing in the former city. Nay, I believe that the tints of the frescos and painted columns were even brighter, and that the walls of the houses were far less ruinous than those of Pompeii. But no house was wholly freed from lava, and the little street ran at the rear of the buildings which were supposed to front on some grander avenue not yet exhumed. It led down, as the custodian pretended, to a wharf, and he showed an iron ring in the wall of the House of Argo, standing at the end of the street, to which, he said, his former fellow-citizens used to fasten their boats, though it was all dry enough there now.

There is evidence in Herculaneum of much more ambitious domestic architecture than seems to have been known in Pompeii. The ground-plan of the houses in the two cities is alike; but in the former there was often a second story, as was proven by the charred ends of beams still protruding from the walls, while in the latter there is only one house which is thought to have aspired to a second floor. The House of Argo is also much larger than any in Pompeii, and its appointments were more magnificent. Indeed, we imagined that in this more purely Greek town we felt an atmosphere of better taste in every thing than prevailed in the fashionable Roman watering-place, though this, too, was a summer resort of the "best society" of the empire. The mosaic pavements were exquisite, and the little bed-chambers dainty and delicious in their decorations. The lavish delight in color found expression in the vividest hues upon the walls, and not only were the columns of the garden painted, but the foliage of the capitals was variously tinted. The garden of the House of Argo was vaster than any of the classic world which we had yet seen, and was superb with a long colonnade of unbroken columns. Between these and the walls of the houses was a pretty pathway of mosaic, and in the midst once stood marble tables, under which the workmen exhuming the city found certain crouching skeletons. At one end was the dining-room, of course, and painted on the wall was a lady with a parasol.

I thought all Herculaneum sad enough, but the profusion of flowers growing wild in this garden gave it a yet more tender and pathetic charm. Here--where so long ago the flowers had bloomed, and perished in the terrible blossoming of the mountain that sent up its fires in the awful similitude of Nature's harmless and lovely forms, and showered its destroying petals all abroad--was it not tragic to find again the soft tints, the graceful shapes, the sweet perfumes of the earth's immortal life? Of them that planted and tended and plucked and bore in their bosoms and twined in their hair these fragile children of the summer, what witness in the world? Only the crouching skeletons under the tables. Alas and alas!

V.

The skeletons went with us throughout Herculaneum, and descended into the cell, all green with damp, under the basilica, and lay down, fettered and manacled in the place of those found there beside the big bronze kettle in which the prisoners used to cook their dinners. How ghastly the thought of it was! If we had really seen this kettle and the skeletons there--as we did not--we could not have suffered more than we did. They took all the life out of the House of Perseus, and the beauty from his pretty little domestic temple to the Penates, and this was all there was left in Herculaneum to see.

"Is there nothing else?" we demand of the custodian.

"Signori, this is all."

"It is mighty little."

"Perdoni, signori! ma----."

"Well," we say sourly to each other, glancing round at the walls of the pit, on the bottom of which the bit of city stands, "it is a good thing to know that Herculaneum amounts to nothing."

X.

CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES.