lava-blocks as fresh as when the last mourner retired from it, casting
"a lingering look behind;" but it leads now only to a shapeless heap
of brick, or to the empty site of a monument that has been razed to
the very foundations.

One piece of marble sculpture especially arrests the eye, and awakens
a chord of feeling in the most callous heart. It represents one of
those _Imagines Clipeatæ_ which the ancient Romans were so fond of
sculpturing in their temples or upon their tombs; a clam shell or
shield with the bust of a man and a woman carved in relief within it,
the hand of the one fondly embracing the neck of the other. Below is a
long Latin inscription, telling that this is the tomb of a brother
and sister who were devotedly attached to each other. Who this soror
and frater were, there is no record to tell. All subsidiary details of
their lives have been allowed to pass away with the other decorations
of the tomb, leaving behind this beautiful expression of household
affection in full and lasting relief. I felt drawn more closely to the
distant ages by this little carving than by anything else. The huge
monuments around weighed down my spirit to the earth. The very effort
to secure immortality by the massiveness of these tombs defeated its
own object. They spoke only of dust to dust and ashes to ashes; but
that little glimpse into the simple love of simple hearts in the
far-off past lifted me above all the decays of the sepulchre. It
assured me that our deepest heart-affections are the helpers of our
highest hopes, and the instinctive guarantees of a life to come. Love
creates its own immortality; for "love is love for evermore."

Along this avenue of death nothing can be more striking than the
profusion of life. It seems as if all the vitality of the many buried
generations had there passed into the fuller life of nature. You can