School Reading By Grades: Fifth Year

THE DESTRUCTION OF POMPEII

Volcanoes can never be trusted. No one knows when one will break out, or what it will do; and those who live close to them – as the city of Naples is close to Mount Vesuvius – must not be astonished if they are blown up or swallowed, as that great and beautiful city of Naples may be without a warning, any day.

For what happened to that same Mount Vesuvius about eighteen hundred years ago in the old Roman times? For ages and ages it had been lying quiet, like any other hill. Beautiful cities were built at its foot – cities filled with people who were as handsome and as comfortable and, I am afraid, as wicked as any people ever were on earth. Fair gardens, vineyards, and olive yards covered the mountain slopes. It was held to be one of the Paradises of the world.

As for the mountain’s being a volcano, who ever thought of that? To be sure, the top of it was a great round crater, or cup, a mile or more across, and a few hundred yards deep. But that was all overgrown with bushes and wild vines full of deer and other wild animals. What sign of fire was there in that? To be sure, also, there was an ugly place below, by the seashore, where smoke and brimstone came out of the ground; and a lake called Avernus, over which poisonous gases hung. But what of that? It had never harmed any one, and how could it harm them?

So they all lived on, merrily and happily enough, till the year A.D. 79. At that time there was stationed in the Bay of Naples a Roman admiral, called Pliny, who was also a very studious and learned man, and author of a famous old book on natural history. He was staying on shore with his sister; and as he sat in his study, she called him out to see a strange cloud which had been hanging for some time over the top of Mount Vesuvius. It was in shape just like a pine tree; not, of course, like the pines which grow in this country, but like an Italian stone pine, with a long straight stem and a flat parasol-shaped top.

Sometimes it was blackish, sometimes spotted; and the good Admiral Pliny, who was always curious about natural science, ordered his rowboat and went away across the bay to see what it could be. Earthquake shocks had been very common for the last few days, but I do not suppose that Pliny thought that the earthquakes and the cloud had anything to do with each other. However, he soon found out that they had; and to his cost. When he was near the opposite shore, some of the sailors met him and begged him to turn back. Cinders and pumice stones were falling down from the sky, and flames were breaking out of the mountain above. But Pliny would go on: he said that if people were in danger it was his duty to help them; and that he must see this strange cloud, and note down the different shapes into which it changed.

But the hot ashes fell faster and faster; the sea ebbed out suddenly, and almost left them on the beach; and Pliny turned away towards a place called Stabiæ, to the house of an old friend who was just going to escape in a boat. Brave Pliny told him not to be afraid; ordered his bath like a true Roman gentleman, and then went in to dinner with a cheerful face. Flames came down from the mountain, nearer and nearer as the night drew on; but Pliny persuaded his friend that they were only fires in some villages from which the peasants had fled; and then went to bed and slept soundly.

However, in the middle of the night, they found the courtyard being fast filled with cinders, and if they had not awakened the Admiral in time, he would never have been able to get out of the house.

The earthquake shocks grew stronger and fiercer, till the house was ready to fall; and Pliny and his friend, and the sailors and the slaves, all fled into the open fields, having pillows over their heads to prevent their being beaten down. By this time, day had come, but not the dawn: for it was still pitch dark. They went down to their boats upon the shore; but the sea raged so horribly that there was no getting on board of them.

Then Pliny grew tired and made his men spread a sail for him that he might lie down upon it. But there came down upon them a rush of flames and a strong smell of sulphur, and all ran for their lives.

Some of the slaves tried to help the Admiral; but he sank down again, overpowered by the brimstone fumes, and so was left behind. When they came back again, there he lay dead; but with his clothes in order, and his face as quiet as if he had been only sleeping. And that was the end of a brave and learned man, a martyr to duty and to the love of science.

But what was going on in the meantime? Under clouds of ashes, cinders, mud, lava, three of those happy cities – Herculaneum, Pompeii, Stabiæ – were buried at once. They were buried just as the people had fled from them, leaving the furniture and the earthenware, often even jewels and gold behind, and here and there a human being who had not had time to escape from the dreadful rain of ashes and dust.

The ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii have been dug into since, and partly uncovered; and the paintings, especially in Pompeii, are found upon the walls still fresh, preserved from the air by the ashes which have covered them in. At Naples there is a famous museum containing the curiosities which have been dug out of the ruined cities; and one can walk along the streets in Pompeii and see the wheel tracks in the pavement along which carts and chariots rolled two thousand years ago.

And what had become of Vesuvius, the treacherous mountain? Half, or more than half, of the side of the old crater had been blown away; and what was left, which is now called the Monte Somma, stands in a half circle round the new cone and the new crater which is burning at this very day. True, after that eruption which killed Pliny, Vesuvius fell asleep again, and did not awake for one hundred and thirty-four years, and then again for two hundred and sixty-nine years; but it has been growing more and more restless as the ages have passed on, and now hardly a year passes without its sending out smoke and stones from its crater, and streams of lava from its sides.

The most popular historical romance in the English language is “The Last Days of Pompeii,” by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. It was first published in 1834, and is a narrative depicting life and manners during the last years of the doomed city. The description of the grand catastrophe is a subject which called forth all the brilliant powers of the author. As a piece of word-painting it has seldom been surpassed.

The cloud which had scattered so deep a murkiness over the day had now settled into a solid and impenetrable mass. But in proportion as the blackness gathered, did the lightnings around Vesuvius increase in their vivid and scorching glare. Nor was their horrible beauty confined to the usual hues of fire; no rainbow ever rivaled their varying and prodigal dyes. Now brightly blue as the most azure depths of a southern sky, – now of a livid and snake-like green, darting restlessly to and fro as the folds of an enormous serpent, – now of a lurid and intolerable crimson, gushing forth through the columns of smoke, far and wide, and lighting up the whole city from arch to arch – then suddenly dying into a sickly paleness, like the ghost of their own life!

In the pauses of the showers you heard the rumbling of the earth beneath, and the groaning waves of the tortured sea; or, lower still, and audible but to the watch of intensest fear, the grinding and hissing murmur of the escaping gases through the chasms of the distant mountain. Sometimes the cloud appeared to break from its solid mass, and, by the lightning to assume quaint and vast mimicries of human or of monster shapes, striding across the gloom, hurtling one upon the other, and vanishing swiftly into the abyss of shade; so that, to the eyes and fancies of the affrighted wanderers, the vapors seemed like the bodily forms of gigantic foes – the agents of terror and of death.

The ashes in many places were already knee-deep; and the boiling showers which came from the steaming breath of the volcano forced their way into the houses, bearing with them a strong and suffocating vapor. In some places, immense fragments of rock, hurled upon the house roofs, bore down along the streets masses of confused ruin, yet more and more, with every hour, obstructed the way; and as the day advanced, the motion of the earth was more sensibly felt – the footing seemed to slide and creep – nor could chariot or litter be kept steady even on the most level ground.

Sometimes the huger stones, striking against each other as they fell, broke into countless fragments, emitting sparks of fire, which caught whatever was combustible within their reach; and along the plains beyond the city the darkness was now terribly relieved, for several houses and even vineyards had been set on flames; and at various intervals the fires rose sullenly and fiercely against the solid gloom. To add to this partial relief of the darkness, the citizens had, here and there, in the more public places, such as the porticoes of temples and the entrances to the forum, endeavored to place rows of torches; but these rarely continued long; the showers and the winds extinguished them, and the sudden darkness into which their sudden birth was converted had something in it doubly terrible and doubly impressing on the impotence of human hopes, the lesson of despair.

Frequently, by the momentary light of these torches, parties of fugitives encountered each other, some hurrying towards the sea, others flying from the sea back to the land. The whole elements of civilization were broken up. Ever and anon, by the flickering lights, you saw the thief hastening by the most solemn authorities of the law, laden with the produce of his sudden gains. If, in the darkness, wife was separated from husband, or parent from child, vain was the hope of reunion. Each hurried blindly and confusedly on. Nothing in all the various and complicated machinery of social life was left save the primal law of self-preservation.

Through this awful scene did Glaucus wade his way, accompanied by Ione and the blind girl. Suddenly, a rush of hundreds, in their path to the sea, swept by them. Nydia was torn from the side of Glaucus, who with Ione was borne rapidly onward; and when the crowd (whose forms they saw not, so thick was the gloom) were gone, Nydia was still separated from their side. Glaucus shouted her name. No answer came. They retraced their steps, – in vain: they could not discover her, – it was evident she had been swept along some other direction by the human current. Their friend, their preserver was lost! And hitherto Nydia had been their guide. Her blindness rendered the scene familiar to her alone. Accustomed, through a perpetual night, to thread the windings of the city, she had led them unerringly towards the seashore, by which they had resolved to hazard an escape. Now, which way could they wend? All was rayless to them – a maze without a clue. Wearied, despondent, bewildered, they, however, passed along, the ashes falling upon their heads, the fragmentary stones dashing up in sparkles before their feet.

Advancing, as men grope for escape in a dungeon, they continued their uncertain way. At the moments when the volcanic lightnings lingered over the streets, they were enabled, by that awful light, to steer and guide their progress: yet, little did the view it presented to them cheer or encourage their path. In parts where the ashes lay dry and unmixed with the boiling torrents, cast upward from the mountain at capricious intervals, the surface of the earth presented a leprous and ghastly white. In other places, cinder and rock lay matted in heaps.

The groans of the dying were broken by wild shrieks of women’s terror – now near, now distant – which, when heard in the utter darkness, were rendered doubly appalling by the sense of helplessness and the uncertainty of the perils around; and clear and distinct through all were the mighty and various noises from the Fatal Mountain; its rushing winds; its whirling torrents; and, from time to time, the burst and roar of some more fiery and fierce explosion.

Suddenly the place became lighted with an intense and lurid glow. Bright and gigantic through the darkness, which closed around it like the walls of hell, the mountain shone – a pile of fire. Its summit seemed riven in two; or rather, above its surface there seemed to rise two monster shapes, each confronting each, as Demons contending for a World. These were of one deep blood-red hue of fire, which lighted up the whole atmosphere far and wide; but below, the nether part of the mountain was still dark and shrouded, save in three places, adown which flowed, serpentine and irregular, rivers of the molten lava. Darkly red through the profound gloom of their banks, they flowed slowly on, as towards the devoted city. Over the broadest there seemed to spring a cragged and stupendous arch, from which, as from the jaws of hell, gushed the sources of the stupendous Phlegethon. And through the stilled air was heard the rattling of the fragments of rock, hurling one upon another as they were borne down the fiery cataracts – darkening, for one instant, the spot where they fell, and suffused the next in the burnished hues of the flood along which they floated.

Glaucus turned in awe, caught Ione in his arms, and fled along the street, that was now intensely luminous. But suddenly a duller shade fell over the air. Instinctively he turned to the mountain, and behold! one of the two gigantic crests, into which the summit had been divided, rocked and wavered to and fro; and then, with a sound, the mightiness of which no language can describe, it fell from its burning base, and rushed, an avalanche of fire, down the sides of the mountain. At the same instant gushed forth a volume of blackest smoke – rolling on, over air, sea, and earth.

Another – and another – and another shower of ashes, far more profuse than before, scattered fresh desolation along the streets. Darkness once more wrapped them as a veil; and Glaucus, his bold heart at last quelled and despairing, sank beneath the cover of an arch, and, clasping Ione to his heart, resigned himself to die.

Meanwhile Nydia, when separated by the throng from Glaucus and Ione, had in vain endeavored to regain them. In vain she raised that plaintive cry so peculiar to the blind; it was lost amidst a thousand shrieks of more selfish terror. Again and again she returned to the spot where they had been divided – to find her companions gone, to seize every fugitive – to inquire of Glaucus – to be dashed aside in the impatience of distraction. Who in that hour spared one thought to his neighbor?

At length it occurred to Nydia that, as it had been resolved to seek the seashore for escape, her most probable chance of rejoining her companions would be to persevere in that direction. Guiding her steps, then, by the staff which she always carried, she continued to avoid the masses of ruin which incumbered the path, and to take the nearest direction to the seaside.

She had gone some distance toward the seashore, when she chanced to hear from one of the fugitives that Glaucus was resting beneath the arch of the forum. She at once turned her back on the sea, and retraced her steps to the city. She gained the forum – the arch; she stooped down – she felt around – she called on the name of Glaucus.

A weak voice answered, “Who calls on me? Is it the voice of the Shades? Lo! I am prepared!”

“Arise! follow me! Take my hand! Glaucus, thou shalt be saved!”

In wonder and sudden hope, Glaucus arose, “Nydia still! Ah! thou, then, art safe!”

The tender joy of his voice pierced the heart of the poor Thessalian, and she blessed him for his thought of her.

Half-leading, half-carrying Ione, Glaucus followed his guide. After many pauses they gained the sea, and joined a group, who, bolder than the rest, resolved to hazard any peril rather than continue in such a scene. In darkness they put forth to sea; but, as they cleared the land and caught new aspects of the mountain, its channels of molten fire threw a partial redness over the waves.

Utterly exhausted and worn out, Ione slept on the breast of Glaucus, and Nydia lay at his feet. Meanwhile the showers of dust and ashes, still borne aloft, fell into the wave, and scattered their snows over the deck. Far and wide, borne by the winds, those showers descended upon the remotest climes, startling even the swarthy African, and whirled along the antique soil of Syria and Egypt.

And meekly, softly, beautifully dawned at last the light over the trembling deep, – the winds were sinking into rest, – the foam died from the glowing azure of that delicious sea. Around the east, their mists caught gradually the rosy hues that heralded the morning. Light was about to resume her reign. Yet, still, dark, and massive in the distance lay the broken fragments of the destroying cloud, from which red streaks, burning more and more dimly, betrayed the yet rolling fires of the mountain of the “Scorched Fields.” The white walls and gleaming columns that had adorned the lovely coasts were no more. Sullen and dull were the shores so lately crested by the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii. The darlings of the Deep were snatched from her embrace. Century after century shall the mighty Mother stretch forth her azure arms, and know them not – moaning round the sepulchers of the Lost!

THE STRANGER ON THE SILL

OUR COUNTRY

We cannot honor our country with too deep a reverence; we cannot love her with an affection too pure and fervent; we cannot serve her with an energy of purpose or a faithfulness of zeal too steadfast and ardent. And what is our country? It is not the East, with her hills and her valleys, with her countless sails, and the rocky ramparts of her shores. It is not the North, with her thousand villages and her harvest home, with her frontiers of the lakes and the ocean. It is not the West, with her forest sea and her inland isles, with her luxuriant expanses, clothed in the verdant corn; with her beautiful Ohio and her verdant Missouri. Nor is it yet the South, opulent in the mimic snow of the cotton, in the rich plantations of the rustling cane, and in the golden robes of the rice field. What are these but the sister families of one greater, better, holier family, OUR COUNTRY?

I profess, sir, in my career hitherto, to have kept steadily in view the prosperity and the honor of the whole country, and the preservation of the Federal Union. I have not allowed myself to look beyond the Union, to see what might lie hidden in the dark recess behind; I have not coolly weighed the chances of preserving liberty, when the bonds that unite us together shall be broken asunder; I have not accustomed myself to hang over the precipice of disunion, to see whether, with my short sight, I can fathom the depths of the abyss below; nor could I regard him as a safe counselor in the affairs of this government, whose thoughts should be mainly bent on considering, not how the Union should be preserved, but how tolerable might be the condition of the people when it shall be broken up and destroyed.