es have labored in vain, to give a just idea of the Campo Santo.
Yet it is most worthy celebration. Those exquisitely arched and
traceried colonnades seem to grow like the slim cypresses out of the
sainted earth of Jerusalem; and those old paintings, made when Art
was--if ever--a Soul, and not as now a mere Intelligence, enforce
more effectively than their authors conceived the lessons of life and
death; for they are themselves becoming part of the triumphant decay
they represent. If it was awful once to look upon that strange scene
where the gay lords and ladies of the chase come suddenly upon three
dead men in their coffins, while the devoted hermits enjoy the peace
of a dismal righteousness on a hill in the background, it is yet more
tragic to behold it now when the dead men are hardly discernible in
their coffins, and the hermits are but the vaguest shadows of gloomy
bliss. Alas! Death mocks even the homage done him by our poor fears
and hopes: with dust he wipes out dust, and with decay he blots the
image of decay.

I assure the reader that I made none of these apt reflections in
the Campo Santo at Pisa, but have written them out this morning in
Cambridge because there happens to be an east wind blowing. No
one could have been sad in the company of our cheerful and patient
cicerone, who, although visibly anxious to get his fourteen-thousandth
American family away, still would not go till he had shown us that
monument to a dead enmity which hangs in the Campo Santo. This is the
mighty chain which the Pisans, in their old wars with the Genoese,
once stretched across the mouth of their harbor to prevent the
entrance of the hostile galleys. The Genoese with no great trouble
carried the chain away, and kept it ever afterward till 1860, when
Pisa was united to the kingdom of Italy. Then the trophy was restored
to the Pisans, and with public rejoicings placed in the Campo Santo,
an emblem of reconciliation and perpetual amity between ancient
foes. [I read in Mr. Norton's _Notes of Travel and Study in Italy_,
that he saw in the Campo Santo, as long ago as 1856, "the chains that
marked the servitude of Pisa, now restored by Florence," and it is
of course possible that our cicerone may have employed one of those
chains for the different historical purpose I have mentioned. It would
be a thousand pities, I think, if a monument of that sort should be
limited to the commemoration of one fact only.] It is not a very good
world,