And forward walk with heav’n-fix’d eyes,
Each flow’ry isle avoid, each precipice despise;
Till, spite of pleasure, fear, or pain,
Eternity’s firm coast we gain,
Whence looking back with alter’d eye,
These fleeting phantoms we’ll descry,
And find alike the song and theme
Was but—an empty, airy dream.
When one has exhausted all the ideas presented to the mind by the sight of Monte Nuovo, made in one night by the eruption of Solfa Terra, now sunk into itself and almost extinguished; by the lake Avernus; by the Phlegræan fields, where Jupiter killed the giants, with such thunderbolts as fell about our ears the other night I trust, and buried one of them alive under mount Ætna; when one has seen the Sybil’s grott, and the Elysian plains, and every seat of fable and of verse; when one has run about repeating Virgil’s verses and Claudian’s by turns, and handled the hot sand under the cool waves of Baia; when one has seen Cicero’s villa and Diana’s temple, and talked about antiquities till one is afraid of one’s own pedantry, and tired of every one’s else; it is almost time to recollect realities of more near interest to such of us as are not ashamed of being Christians, and to remember that it was at Pozzuoli St. Paul arrived after the storms he met with in these seas. The wind is still called here Sieuroc, o sia lo vento Greco; and their manner of pronouncing it led me to think it might possibly be that called in Scripture Euroclydon, abbreviated by that grammatical figure, which lops off the concluding syllables. The old Pastor Patrobas too, who received and entertained the Apostle here, lies interred under the altar of an old church at Pozzuoli, made out of the remains of a temple to Jupiter, whose pillars are in good preservation: I was earnest to see the place at least, as every thing named in the New Testament is of true importance, but one meets few people of the same taste: for Romanists take most delight in venerating traditionary heroes, and Calvinists, perhaps too easily disgusted, desire to venerate no heroes at all.
Some curious inscriptions here, to me not legible, shew how this poor country has been overwhelmed by tyrants, earthquakes, Saracens! not to mention the Goths and Vandals, who however left no traces but desolation: while, as the prophet Joel says, “The ground was as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness.”