“Between the mountains and the tideless sea Stretches a plain where silence reigns supreme; A land of asphodel and weeds that teem Where once a city’s life ran joyfully. ‘Vanity! Vanity! All Vanity!’ Whisper the winds to Sele’s murmuring stream; Whilst the vast temples preach th’ eternal theme, How pass the glories and their memory. Think what these ruins saw! what songs and cries Once through these roofless colonnades did ring! What crowds here gathered, where the all-seeing skies For centuries have watched the daisies spring! Dead all within this crumbling circle lies: Dead as the roses Roman bards did sing.” Beautiful as Paestum presents itself in the bright noontide of a Spring day, beneath a cloudless sky and with the blue waters of the Mediterranean lapping the distant yellow sands, there appears something incongruous in the sharp contrast between this joyfulness of vigorous life and the solemn atmosphere of the deserted city. The noisy twittering of multitudes of ubiquitous sparrows, equally at home in Doric temples as amongst the sooty chimney stacks of London; the twinklings and rustlings of the lizards in the young leaves and grass; the polyglot babble of excursionists from Naples or La Cava that a warm day in Spring invariably attracts to Paestum:—these are not sounds that blend well with the solemn spirit of the place. We long to cross the intervening ages so as to throw ourselves, if only for one short hour, outside the cares and interests of to-day into the heart of that refined civilisation which is gone for ever;—with the cheerful sunlight around us, and with our fellow-mortals on pleasure bent close at hand, we find it difficult to forget the present. Would it be possible, we ask ourselves, to spend a nocturnal vigil within the hall of the great temple of the Sea God, so as to behold, like that undaunted traveller, Crawford Ramage, the shafts of crystalline moonlight shed through the aperture of the roof leap from pillar to pillar, making bars of brilliant light amidst the surrounding blackness! O to sit and meditate thus engrossed with the memory of the past, and with no other sounds around us than the sad cry of the _aziola_, the little downy owl that Shelley so loved! But the gaunt spectre of Fever ever haunts this spot, and after sunset his power is supreme; so that he would be a bold man indeed who in an age of luxury and selfish comfort would carry out an idea at once so romantic and so perilous.