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<h2> Chapter The Last </h2>
<p>WHEREIN ALL THINGS CEASE LETTER FROM GLAUCUS TO SALLUST, TEN YEARS AFTER
THE DESTRUCTION OF POMPEII.</p>
<p>'Athens.</p>
<p>GLAUCUS to his beloved Sallust—greeting and health!—You
request me to visit you at Rome—no, Sallust, come rather to me at
Athens! I have forsworn the Imperial City, its mighty tumult and hollow
joys. In my own land henceforth I dwell for ever. The ghost of our
departed greatness is dearer to me than the gaudy life of your loud
prosperity. There is a charm to me which no other spot can supply, in the
porticoes hallowed still by holy and venerable shades. In the olive-groves
of Ilyssus I still hear the voice of poetry—on the heights of Phyle,
the clouds of twilight seem yet the shrouds of departed freedom—the
heralds—the heralds—of the morrow that shall come! You smile
at my enthusiasm, Sallust!—better be hopeful in chains than resigned
to their glitter. You tell me you are sure that I cannot enjoy life in
these melancholy haunts of a fallen majesty. You dwell with rapture on the
Roman splendors, and the luxuries of the imperial court. My Sallust—"non
sum qualis eram"—I am not what I was! The events of my life have
sobered the bounding blood of my youth. My health has never quite
recovered its wonted elasticity ere it felt the pangs of disease, and
languished in the damps of a criminal's dungeon. My mind has never shaken
off the dark shadow of the Last Day of Pompeii—the horror and the
desolation of that awful ruin!—Our beloved, our remembered Nydia! I
have reared a tomb to her shade, and I see it every day from the window of
my study. It keeps alive in me a tender recollection—a not
unpleasing sadness—which are but a fitting homage to her fidelity,
and the mysteriousness of her early death. Ione gathers the flowers, but
my own hand wreathes them daily around the tomb. She was worthy of a tomb
in Athens!</p>
<p>'You speak of the growing sect of the Christians in Rome. Sallust, to you
I may confide my secret; I have pondered much over that faith—I have
adopted it. After the destruction of Pompeii, I met once more with
Olinthus—saved, alas! only for a day, and falling afterwards a
martyr to the indomitable energy of his zeal. In my preservation from the
lion and the earthquake he taught me to behold the hand of the unknown
God! I listened—believed—adored! My own, my more than ever
beloved Ione, has also embraced the creed!—a creed, Sallust, which,
shedding light over this world, gathers its concentrated glory, like a
sunset, over the next! We know that we are united in the soul, as in the
flesh, for ever and for ever! Ages may roll on, our very dust be
dissolved, the earth shrivelled like a scroll; but round and round the
circle of eternity rolls the wheel of life—imperishable—unceasing!
And as the earth from the sun, so immortality drinks happiness from
virtue, which is the smile upon the face of God! Visit me, then, Sallust;
bring with you the learned scrolls of Epicurus, Pythagoras, Diogenes; arm
yourself for defeat; and let us, amidst the groves of Academus, dispute,
under a surer guide than any granted to our fathers, on the mighty problem
of the true ends of life and the nature of the soul.</p>
<p>'Ione—at that name my heart yet beats!—Ione is by my side as I
write: I lift my eyes, and meet her smile. The sunlight quivers over
Hymettus: and along my garden I hear the hum of the summer bees. Am I
happy, ask you? Oh, what can Rome give me equal to what I possess at
Athens? Here, everything awakens the soul and inspires the affections—the
trees, the waters, the hills, the skies, are those of Athens!—fair,
though mourning-mother of the Poetry and the Wisdom of the World. In my
hall I see the marble faces of my ancestors. In the Ceramicus, I survey
their tombs! In the streets, I behold the hand of Phidias and the soul of
Pericles. Harmodius, Aristogiton—they are everywhere—but in
our hearts!—in mine, at least, they shall not perish! If anything
can make me forget that I am an Athenian and not free, it is partly the
soothing—the love—watchful, vivid, sleepless—of Ione—a
love that has taken a new sentiment in our new creed—a love which
none of our poets, beautiful though they be, had shadowed forth in
description; for mingled with religion, it partakes of religion; it is
blended with pure and unworldly thoughts; it is that which we may hope to
carry through eternity, and keep, therefore, white and unsullied, that we
may not blush to confess it to our God! This is the true type of the dark
fable of our Grecian Eros and Psyche—it is, in truth, the soul
asleep in the arms of love. And if this, our love, support me partly
against the fever of the desire for freedom, my religion supports me more;
for whenever I would grasp the sword and sound the shell, and rush to a
new Marathon (but Marathon without victory), I feel my despair at the
chilling thought of my country's impotence—the crushing weight of
the Roman yoke, comforted, at least, by the thought that earth is but the
beginning of life—that the glory of a few years matters little in
the vast space of eternity—that there is no perfect freedom till the
chains of clay fall from the soul, and all space, all time, become its
heritage and domain. Yet, Sallust, some mixture of the soft Greek blood
still mingles with my faith. I can share not the zeal of those who see
crime and eternal wrath in men who cannot believe as they. I shudder not
at the creed of others. I dare not curse them—I pray the Great
Father to convert. This lukewarmness exposes me to some suspicion amongst
the Christians: but I forgive it; and, not offending openly the prejudices
of the crowd, I am thus enabled to protect my brethren from the danger of
the law, and the consequences of their own zeal. If moderation seem to me
the natural creature of benevolence, it gives, also, the greatest scope to
beneficence.</p>
<p>'Such, then, O Sallust! is my life—such my opinions. In this manner
I greet existence and await death. And thou, glad-hearted and kindly pupil
of Epicurus, thou... But come hither, and see what enjoyments, what hopes
are ours—and not the splendor of imperial banquets, nor the shouts
of the crowded circus, nor the noisy forum, nor the glittering theatre,
nor the luxuriant gardens, nor the voluptuous baths of Rome—shall
seem to thee to constitute a life of more vivid and uninterrupted
happiness than that which thou so unreasonably pitiest as the career of
Glaucus the Athenian!—Farewell!'</p>
<p>Nearly Seventeen Centuries had rolled away when the City of Pompeii was
disinterred from its silent tomb, all vivid with undimmed hues; its walls
fresh as if painted yesterday—not a hue faded on the rich mosaic of
its floors—in its forum the half-finished columns as left by the
workman's hand—in its gardens the sacrificial tripod—in its
halls the chest of treasure—in its baths the strigil—in its
theatres the counter of admission—in its saloons the furniture and
the lamp—in its triclinia the fragments of the last feast—in
its cubicula the perfumes and the rouge of faded beauty—and
everywhere the bones and skeletons of those who once moved the springs of
that minute yet gorgeous machine of luxury and of life! In the house of
Diomed, in the subterranean vaults, twenty skeletons (one of a babe) were
discovered in one spot by the door, covered by a fine ashen dust, that had
evidently been wafted slowly through the apertures, until it had filled
the whole space. There were jewels and coins, candelabra for unavailing
light, and wine hardened in the amphorae for a prolongation of agonized
life. The sand, consolidated by damps, had taken the forms of the
skeletons as in a cast; and the traveler may yet see the impression of a
female neck and bosom of young and round proportions—the trace of
the fated Julia! It seems to the inquirer as if the air had been gradually
changed into a sulphurous vapor; the inmates of the vaults had rushed to
the door, to find it closed and blocked up by the scoria without, and in
their attempts to force it, had been suffocated with the atmosphere.</p>
<p>In the garden was found a skeleton with a key by its bony hand, and near
it a bag of coins. This is believed to have been the master of the house—the
unfortunate Diomed, who had probably sought to escape by the garden, and
been destroyed either by the vapors or some fragment of stone. Beside some
silver vases lay another skeleton, probably of a slave.</p>
<p>The houses of Sallust and of Pansa, the Temple of Isis, with the juggling
concealments behind the statues—the lurking-place of its holy
oracles—are now bared to the gaze of the curious. In one of the
chambers of that temple was found a huge skeleton with an axe beside it:
two walls had been pierced by the axe—the victim could penetrate no
farther. In the midst of the city was found another skeleton, by the side
of which was a heap of coins, and many of the mystic ornaments of the fane
of Isis. Death had fallen upon him in his avarice, and Calenus perished
simultaneously with Burbo! As the excavators cleared on through the mass
of ruin, they found the skeleton of a man literally severed in two by a
prostrate column; the skull was of so striking a conformation, so boldly
marked in its intellectual as well as its worse physical developments,
that it has excited the constant speculation of every itinerant believer
in the theories of Spurzheim who has gazed upon that ruined palace of the
mind. Still, after the lapse of ages, the traveler may survey that airy
hall within whose cunning galleries and elaborate chambers once thought,
reasoned, dreamed, and sinned, the soul of Arbaces the Egyptian.</p>
<p>Viewing the various witnesses of a social system which has passed from the
world for ever—a stranger, from that remote and barbarian Isle which
the Imperial Roman shivered when he named, paused amidst the delights of
the soft Campania and composed this history!</p>
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