| "Meantime, charred corses in one sepulchre Of withering ashes lay, and voices rose, Fewer and fainter, and, each moment, groans Were hushed, and dead babes on dead bosoms lay, And lips were blasted into breathlessness Ere the death kiss was given, and spirits passed The ebbless, dark, mysterious waves, where dreams Hover and pulses throb and many a brain Swims wild with terrible desires to know The destinies of worlds that lie beyond. The thick air panted as in nature's death, And every breath was anguish; every face Was terror's image, where the soul looked forth, As looked, sometimes, far on the edge of heaven, A momentary star the tempest palled. From ghastlier lips now rose a wilder voice, As from a ruin'd sanctuary's gloom, Like savage winds from the Chorasmian waste Rushing, with sobs and suffocating screams," etc. |
But, though we have been more highly honored by this last chef d'oeuvre of the honorable Eugene Aram than any author within our knowledge, yet others are entitled to their property. Speaking of the skeleton of Arbaces, Bulwer says—
"The scull was of so remarkable a conformation, so boldly marked in its intellectual, as well as its worse physical developments, that it has excited the constant speculation of every itinerant believer in the theories of Spurzheim who has gazed upon that ruined palace of the mind. Still, after a lapse of eighteen centuries, the traveller may survey that airy hall, within whose cunning galleries and elaborate chambers, once thought, reasoned, dreamed, and sinned, the soul of Arbaces the Egyptian!"
But Byron said, long ago, in Childe Harold, when gazing on a skull:
| "Yes, this was once ambition's airy hall, The dome of thought, the palace of the soul," etc. |
And, once more, the fashionable Pelham moralizes: "and as the Earth from the Sun, so immortality drinks happiness from virtue, which is the smile upon the face of God."12 This he italicises as one of his most wondrous original reflections—yet it may be found in the Diary of a Physician.13
12 Vol. ii. p. 196.
13 In the story called 'A Young Man about Town,' we think.
Mr. Bulwer is particularly conceited and arrogant with respect to his subject. He asserts that all others have failed in attempting to describe the destruction of Pompeii, and that, therefore, he will stand alone, the intellectual monarch of the Ruins. The candid and modest and original gentleman probably forgot 'Valerius' and Croly and Milman and Dr. Gray and ourself; but the productions of such persons can be of little consequence to such a Paul Clifford in letters and Mirabeau in morals.
Mr. Bulwer, likewise, is ostentatious of his learning, and he quotes from ancient authors with an air of infinite self-complacency, though his citations had been conveniently collected, a century since, in the Archæologia Græca of Archbishop Potter! These volumes now lie before us, and there may all his erudition be found within a very accessible compass. His theological knowledge or deistical design, we know not which, is not more profound or canonical; for he makes his Christian Olinthus say, that "eighty years ago," that is from the birth of Christ, "there was no assurance to man of God or of a certain or definite future beyond the grave"!!