"
POMPEII.
The silence there was what most haunted me.
Long, speechless streets, whose stepping-stones invite
Feet which shall never come; to left and right
Gay colonnades and courts,--beyond, the glee,
Heartless, of that forgetful Pagan sea.
O'er roofless homes and waiting streets, the light
Lies with a pathos sorrowfuler than night.
Fancy forbids this doom of Life with Death
Wedded; and with a wand restores the Life.
The jostling throngs swarm, animate, beneath
The open shops, and all the tropic strife
Of voices, Roman, Greek, Barbarian, mix. The wreath
Indolent hangs on far Vesuvius's crest;
And beyond the glowing town, and guiltless sea, sweet rest.
Tom Appleton was greatly interested in the performances of the
spiritualists, trance mediums, and other persons pretending to
supernatural powers. How far he believed in this occult science can now
only be conjectured, but he was not a man to be easily played upon. He
thought at least that there was more in it than was dreamed of by
philosophers. When the Longfellow party was at Florence in April, 1869,
Prince George of Hanover, recently driven from his kingdom by Bismarck,
called to see the poet, and finding that he had gone out, was entertained
by Mr.
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