Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII | Page 9

his own poems while seated in the shadow of the tomb. If further confirmation were needed of the story that Virgil was laid here, it would be found in the fact that Silius Italicus, who lived at the same time with Statius, purchased the tomb of Virgil, restored it from the neglect into which it had fallen, and celebrated funeral rites before it.
The tomb was originally shaded by a gigantic bay-tree, which is said to have died on the death of Dante. Petrarch, who was brought hither by King Robert, planted another, which existed in the time of Sannazaro, but was destroyed by relic-collectors in the last century. A branch was sent to Frederick the Great by the Margravine of Baireuth, with some verses by Voltaire. If from no other cause, the tomb would be interesting from its visitors; here Boccaccio renounced the career of a merchant for that of a poet, and a well-known legend, that St. Paul visited the sepulcher of Virgil at Naples, was long commemorated in the verse of a hymn used in the service for St. Paul's Day at Mantua.
The tomb is a small, square, vaulted chamber with three windows. Early in the sixteenth century a funeral urn, containing the ashes of the poet, stood in the center, supported by nine little marble pillars. Some say that Robert of Anjou removed it, in 1326, for security to the Castel Nuovo, others that it was given by the Government to a cardinal from Mantua, who died at Genoa on his way home. In either event the urn is now lost.
It is just beneath the tomb that the road to Pozzuoli enters the famous Grotto of Posilipo, a tunnel about half a mile long, in breadth from 25 to 30 feet, and varying from about 90 feet in height near the entrance, to little more than 20 feet at points of the interior. Petronius and Seneca mention its narrow gloomy passage with horror, in the reign of Nero, when it was so low that it could only be used for foot-passengers, who were obliged to stoop in passing through.
In the fifteenth century King Alphonso I. gave it height by lowering the floor, which was paved by Don Pedro di Toledo a hundred years later. In the Middle Ages the grotto was ascribed to the magic arts of Virgil. In recent years it has been the chief means of communication between Naples and Baiae, and is at all times filled with dust and noise, the flickering lights and resounding echoes giving it a most weird effect. However much one may abuse Neapolitans, we may consider in their favor, as Swinburne observes, "what a terror this dark grotto would be in London!"

TWO ASCENTS OF VESUVIUS[8]
BY JOHANN WOLGANG VON GOETHE
At the foot of the steep ascent, we were received by two guides, one old, the other young, but both active fellows. The first pulled me up the path, the other Tischbein[9]--pulled I say, for these guides are girded round the waist with a leathern belt, which the traveler takes hold of, and being drawn up by his guide, makes his way the easier with foot and staff. In this manner we reached the flat from which the cone rises; toward the north lay the ruins of the summit.
A glance westward over the country beneath us, removed, as well as a bath could, all feeling of exhaustion and fatigue, and we now went round the ever-smoking cone, as it threw out its stones and ashes. Wherever the space allowed of our viewing it at a sufficient distance, it appeared a grand and elevating spectacle. In the first place, a violent thundering toned forth from its deepest abyss, then stones of larger and smaller sizes were showered into the air by thousands, and enveloped by clouds of ashes. The greatest part fell again into the gorge; the rest of the fragments, receiving a lateral inclination, and falling on the outside of the crater, made a marvelous rumbling noise. First of all the larger masses plumped against the side, and rebounded with a dull heavy sound; then the smaller came rattling down; and last of all, drizzled a shower of ashes. All this took place at regular intervals, which by slowly counting, we were able to measure pretty accurately.
Between the summit, however, and the cone the space is narrow enough; moreover, several stones fell around us, and made the circuit anything but agreeable. Tischbein now felt more disgusted than ever with Vesuvius, as the monster, not content with being hateful, showed an inclination to become mischievous also.
As, however, the presence of danger generally exercises on man a kind of attraction, and calls forth a spirit of opposition in the human breast to defy it, I bethought myself that, in the interval of the