thing really wonderful and worthy of all admiration. Here the Sibyl
delivered her oracles, we were told by those who had received them
from their ancestors, and who kept them even as their patrimony. Also,
in the middle of the sanctuary, they showed us three receptacles cut
in the same rock, and in which, they being filled with water, she
bathed, as they said, and when she resumed her garments, she retired
into the inner part of the sanctuary, likewise cut in the same rock,
and there being seated on a high place in the centre, she prophesied."
But after all you do not care to fasten your attention upon any
particular spot, for you feel that the whole place is overshadowed by
the presence of this mysterious being; and rock, and hill, and bush
are invested with an air of solemn majesty, and with the memory of an
ancient sanctity.

Nature has taken back the ruins of Cumae so completely to her own
bosom, that it is difficult to believe that on this desolate spot once
stood one of the most powerful cities of antiquity, which colonised a
large part of Southern Italy. A sad, lonely, fateful place it is,
haunted for ever by the gods of old, the dreams of men. A silence,
almost painful in its intensity, broods over its deserted fields;
hardly a living thing disturbs the solitude; and the traces of man's
occupancy are few and faint. The air seems heavy with the breath of
the malaria; and no one would care to run the risk of fever by
lingering on the spot to watch the sunset gilding the gloom of the
Acropolis with a halo of kindred radiance. Every breeze that stirs the
tall grasses and the leaves of the brushwood of the dismantled citadel
has a wail in it; the long-drawn murmur of the peaceful sea at the
foot of the hill comes up with a melancholy cadence to the ear; and
even on the beautiful cyclamens and veronicas that strive to enliven
the ruins of the temples of Apollo and Serapis, emblems of the
immortal youth and signs of the renewing power of Nature as they are,
has fallen the gray shadow of the past. Each pathetic bit of ruin has
about it the consciousness of an almost fabulous antiquity, and by its
very vagueness appeals more powerfully to the imagination than any
historical associations. "Time here seems to have folded its wings."
In the immemorial calm that is in the air a thousand years seem as one
day. Through all the dim ages no feature of its rugged face has
changed; and all the potent spell of summer noons can only