"Oh, then, the love of life! the struggling rush, The crushing conflict of escape! few, brief, And dire the words delirious fear spake now-- One thought, one action swayed the tossing crowd. All through the vomitories madly sprung, And mass on mass of trembling beings pressed, Gasping and goading, with the savageness That is the child of danger, like the waves Charybdis from his jagged rocks throws down, Mingled by fury--warring in their foam. Some swooned and were trod down by legion feet; Some cried for mercy to the unanswering gods; Some shrieked for parted friends forever lost; And some in passion's chaos, with the yells Of desperation did blaspheme the heavens; And some were still in utterness of woe. Yet all toiled on in trembling waves of life Along the subterranean corridors. Moments were centuries of doubt and dread! Each breathing obstacle a hated thing: Each trampled wretch, a footstool to o'erlook The foremost multitudes; and terror, now, Begat in all a maniac ruthlessness, For in the madness of their agonies Strong men cast down the feeble who delayed Their flight, and maidens on the stones were crushed," etc. Let the reader compare each of these extracts with the other, and form his own opinion of Mr. Bulwer's great powers and originality. These very remarkable coincidences are followed by others not less extraordinary and worthy of commemoration: "But suddenly a duller shade fell over the air. Instinctively he turned to the mountain, and behold! one of the two gigantic crests, into which the summit had been divided, rocked and wavered to and fro; and then, with a sound the mightiness of which no language can describe, it fell from the burning base, and rushed, an avalanche of fire, down the sides of the mountain! At the same instant gushed forth a volume of blackest smoke, rolling on, over air, sea, and earth." "Bright and gigantic through the darkness, which closed around it like the walls of hell, the mountain shone--a pile of fire! Its summit seemed riven in two; or rather above its surface there seemed to rise two monster-shapes, each confronting each, as demons contending for a world. These were of one deep blood-red hue of fire, which lighted up the whole atmosphere far and wide; but _below_, the nether part of the mountain was still dark and shrouded,--save in three places, adown which flowed, serpentine and irregular, rivers of the molten lava. Darkly red through the profound gloom of their banks, they flowed slowly on, as towards the devoted city. Over the broadest there seemed to spring a cragged and stupendous arch, from which, as from the jaws of hell, gushed the sources of the sudden Phlegethon." Among the Death Cries of Pompeii, as we imagined them, is the following lyric: