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 win from it
a languid smile of faintest verdure. The sight of the scanty walls and
scattered bits of Greek sculpture here take you back to the speechless
ages that have left no other memorials of their activity. What is fact
and what is fable it were difficult to tell in this far-away
borderland where they seem to blend. And I do not envy the man who is
not deeply moved at the thought of the simple, old-world piety that
placed a holy presence in this solitary spot, and of the tender awe
with which the mysterious divinity of Cumæ was worshipped by
generations of like passions and sorrows with ourselves--whose very
graves under the shadow of this romantic hill had vanished long ages
before our history had begun.

Every schoolboy is familiar with the picturesque Roman legend of the
Sibyl. It is variously told in connection with the elder and the later
Tarquin, the two Etruscan kings of Rome; and the scene of it is laid
by some in Cumæ--where Tarquinius Superbus spent the last years of