bas-relief. On the
stucco wall that encloses them are little emblematic figures, of a
relief exceedingly low, of dead and dying animals and little winged
genii, and female forms bending in groups in some funereal office. The
higher reliefs represent, one a nautical and the other a Bacchanalian
one. Within the cell stand the crematory urns, sometimes one,
sometimes more. It is said that paintings were found within; which are
now, as has been everything movable in Pompeii, removed and scattered
about in royal museums. These tombs were the most impressive things of
all. The wild woods surround them on either side; and along the broad
stones of the paved road which divides them, you hear the late leaves
of autumn shiver and rustle in the stream of the inconstant wind, as
it were like the steps of ghosts. The radiance and magnificence of
these dwellings of the dead, the white freshness of the scarcely
finished marble, the impassioned or imaginative life of the figures
which adorn them, contrast strangely with the simplicity of the houses
of those who were living when Vesuvius overwhelmed them.

I have forgotten the amphitheater, which is of great magnitude tho
inferior to the Coliseum.

I now understand why the Greeks were such great poets; and above all,
I can account, it seems to me, for the harmony, the unity, the
perfection, the uniform excellence of all their works of art. They
lived in a perpetual commerce with external nature, and nourished
themselves upon the spirits of its forms. Their theaters were all open
to the mountains of the sky. Their columns, the ideal type of a sacred
forest, with its roof of interwoven tracery, admitted the light and
wind. The odor and the freshness of the country penetrated the cities.
Their temples were mostly unparthaic; and the flying clouds, the stars
and the deep sky were seen above. Oh, but for that series of wretched
wars which terminated in the Roman conquest of the world; but for the
Christian religion which put the finishing stroke on the ancient
system; but for those changes that conducted Athens to its ruin--to
what an eminence might not humanity have arrived!

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 37: From an essay written sometime in 1820-21, and suggested
by an article on poetry which his friend, Thomas Love Peacock, had
contributed to the _Literary Miscellany_. John Addington Symonds, one
of Shelley's biographers, cites this paper as containing some of the
finest prose writing of S