SEPULCHRE OF CAIUS CESTIUS--PROTESTANT BURYING GROUND--GRAVES OF KEATS AND SHELLEY--SHELLEY'S LAMENT OVER KEATS--GRAVES OF TWO AMERICANS--BEAUTY OF THE BURIAL PLACE--MONUMENTS OVER TWO INTERESTING YOUNG FEMALES--INSCRIPTION ON KEATS' MONUMENT--THE STYLE OF KEATS' POEMS--GRAVE OF DR. BELL--RESIDENCE AND LITERARY UNDERTAKINGS OF HIS WIDOW. A beautiful pyramid, a hundred and thirteen feet high, built into the ancient wall of Rome, is the proud _Sepulchre of Caius Cestius_. It is the most imperishable of the antiquities, standing as perfect after eighteen hundred years as if it were built but yesterday. Just beyond it, on the declivity of a hill, over the ridge of which the wall passes, crowning it with two mouldering towers, lies the _Protestant burying-ground_. It looks toward Rome, which appears in the distance, between Mount Aventine and a small hill called Mont Testaccio, and leaning to the southeast, the sun lies warm and soft upon its banks, and the grass and wild flowers are there the earliest and tallest of the Campagna. I have been here to-day, to see the graves of _Keats_ and _Shelley_. With a cloudless sky and the most delicious air ever breathed, we sat down upon the marble slab laid over the ashes of poor Shelley, and read his own lament over Keats, who sleeps just below, at the foot of the hill. The cemetery is rudely formed into three terraces, with walks between, and Shelley's grave and one other, without a name, occupy a small nook above, made by the projections of a mouldering wall-tower, and crowded with ivy and shrubs, and a peculiarly fragrant yellow flower, which perfumes the air around for several feet. The avenue by which you ascend from the gate is lined with high bushes of the marsh-rose in the most luxuriant bloom, and all over the cemetery the grass is thickly mingled with flowers of every die. In his preface to his lament over Keats, Shelley says, "he was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of the Protestants, under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome." It is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. "_It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place._" If Shelley had chosen his own grave at the time, he would have selected the very spot where he has since been laid--the most sequestered and flowery nook of the place he describes so feelingly. In the last verses of the elegy, he speaks of it again with the same feeling of its beauty:-- "The spirit of the spot shall lead Thy footsteps to a slope of green access, Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead, A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread.