That the earth did e'er suck in Dropped from the ruined sides of kings. Buried in dust, once dead by fate." "What is that with which you are striking fire on your steel to light your pipe?" said a gentleman to a contadino, whom he had stopped to ask a question. "Una pietra-a stone I found here some months ago, he replied. "Would your Excellency like to see it?" and he extended to him a stone, the edge of which he had worn away on his steel. It was a magnificent intaglio in pietra dura, one of the rarest and largest of the antique stones that exist, and undoubtedly was the shoulder brooch of an imperial mantle worn by one of the Cæsars. For a few pauls the ignorant contadino sold an antique gem which was worth a fortune, and which had for its possessor no other value or use than that of a common flint. Subterranean Rome is vaster than the Rome above ground. Almost every rising hillock has its pozzolano cave which stimulates your curiosity to explore. You enter and creep a short distance into the damp shadow of the earth, and then a shudder comes over you and you return; or else, finding your way blocked up by fallen earth and fragments of ruin, you are glad to turn back, and, after stumbling over stones, to issue again into the warm sunshine. Some of these are entrances into the arenaria or sand quarries of the ancients, which are burrowed far into the bowels of the earth. In these, hunted Christians in fear of martyrdom, robbers and assassins in ancient and medieval days, emperors fleeing for their life from the insurrections of the Golden House were wont to hide themselves. Into one of them, near the Esquiline gate, Asinius was decoyed and murdered, as we learn from Cicero. another, Nero was recommended to take refuge when, with naked feet, disguised, and trembling with apprehension, he passed out the Nomentan gate with death at his heels, and shuddering, refused to bury himself alive in the sand-pit. And all along the Appian Way they afforded hiding-places for thieves, who rushed out from them upon unwary travellers. In But besides the arenaria and latomia, there are the dark labyrinthine galleries of the catacombs, intersecting everywhere the Campagna underground with their burrowing network. Here, in the black tunnelled streets of this subterranean city, is a mighty population of the dead. Tier above tier, story above story, in their narrow walled-up houses, for miles and miles along these sad and silent avenues, lie the skeletons of martyred and persecuted Christians, each with his lacrymatory, now dry, and his little lamp, which went out in the darkness more than fifteen centuries ago. PRAXITELES AND PHRYNE. ATHOUSAND silent years ago, The twilight faint and pale Was drawing o'er the sunset glow When from his work the Sculptor stayed "Thus much is saved from chance and change, That waits for me and thee; Thus much-how little!-from the range Of Death and Destiny. "Phryne, thy human lips shall pale, Nor love nor prayers can aught avail "But there thy smile for centuries On marble lips shall live, For Art can grant what love denies, And fix the fugitive. "Sad thought! nor age nor death shall fade The youth of this cold bust; When this quick brain and hand that made And thou and I are dust! "When all our hopes and fears are dead, And love is like a tune that's played, "This senseless stone, so coldly fair, "Its peace no sorrow shall destroy; The bitterness of vanished joy, The wearing waste of care. "And there upon that silent face "And strangers, when we sleep in peace, Shall say, not quite unmoved, So smiled upon Praxiteles The Phryne whom he loved." Harriet Winslow Sewall. BORN in Portland, Me., 1819. DIED at Wellesley Hills, Mass., 1889. WHY THUS LONGING? WHY th thus longing, thus for ever sighing, Wouldst thou listen to its gentle teaching, Poor indeed thou must be, if around thee To some little world through weal and woe; If no dear eyes thy fond love can brighten- Not by deeds that win the crowd's applauses, Not by martyrdom or vaunted crosses, Canst thou win and wear the immortal crown! Daily struggling, though unloved and lonely, Dost thou revel in the rosy morning, When all nature hails the lord of light, Other hands may grasp the field and forest, Thou art wealthier-all the world is thine. Yet if through earth's wide domains thou rovest, Nature wears the color of the spirit; Sweetly to her worshipper she sings; Ν Herman Melville. BORN in New York, N. Y., 1819. DIED there, 1891. THE BELL-TOWER. [The Piazza Tales. 1856.] IN the south of Europe, nigh a once frescoed capital, now with dank mould cankering its bloom, central in a plain, stands what, at a distance, seems the black mossed stump of some immeasurable pine, fallen, in forgotten days, with Anak and the Titan. As all along where the pine tree falls, its dissolution leaves a mossy mound-last-flung shadow of the perished trunk; never lengthening, never lessening; unsubject to the fleet falsities of the sun; shade immutable, and true gauge which cometh by prostration-so westward from what seems the stump, one steadfast spear of lichened ruin veins the plain. From that tree-top, what birded chimes of silver throats had rung. A stone pine; a metallic aviary in its crown: the Bell-Tower, built by the great mechanician, the unblest foundling, Bannadonna. Like Babel's, its base was laid in a high hour of renovated earth, following the second deluge, when the waters of the Dark Ages had dried up, and once more the green appeared. No wonder that, after so long and deep submersion, the jubilant expectation of the race should, as with Noah's sons, soar into Shinar aspiration. In firm resolve, no man in Europe at that period went beyond Bannadonna. Enriched through commerce with the Levant, the state in which |