is kind of habitation that the ancients
lived almost entirely in the open air, and that it was there they
received their friends. Nothing gives us a more sweet and voluptuous
idea of existence than this climate, which intimately unites man with
nature; we should suppose that the character of their conversation and
their society, ought, with such habits, to be different from those of a
country where the rigour of the cold forces the inhabitants to shut
themselves up in their houses. We understand better the Dialogues of
Plato in contemplating those porches under which the ancients walked
during one half of the day. They were incessantly animated by the
spectacle of a beautiful sky: social order, according to their
conceptions, was not the dry combination of calculation and force, but a
happy assemblage of institutions, which stimulated the faculties,
unfolded the soul, and directed man to the perfection of himself and his
equals.

Antiquity inspires an insatiable curiosity. Those men of erudition who
are occupied only in forming a collection of names which they call
history, are certainly divested of all imagination. But to penetrate the
remotest periods of the past, to interrogate the human heart through the
intervening gloom of ages, to seize a fact by the help of a word, and by
the aid of that fact to discover the character and manners of a nation;
in effect, to go back to the remotest time, to figure to ourselves how
the earth in its first youth appeared to the eyes of man, and in what
manner the human race then supported the gift of existence which
civilization has now rendered so complicated, is a continual effort of
the imagination, which divines and discovers the finest secrets that
reflection and study can reveal to us. This occupation of the mind
Oswald found most fascinating, and often repeated to Corinne that if he
had not been taken up with the noblest interests in his own country, he
could only have found life supportable in those parts where the
monuments of history supply the place of present existence. We must at
least regret glory when it is no longer possible to obtain it. It is
forgetfulness alone that debases the soul; but it may find an asylum in
the past, when barren circumstances deprive actions of their aim.

On leaving Pompei and returning to Portici, Corinne and Lord Nelville
were surrounded by the inhabitants, who cried to them loudly to come and
see _the mountain_; so they call _Vesuvius_. I