Quantitatively there were
plenty of new impressions to be had; impressions of more roofs, gardens,
columns, houses, temples, walls, frescos; but qualitatively the Greater
Pompeii was now not different from the lesser which I remembered so
well.
This, at least, was what I said to myself on the ground and afterward in
the National Museum at Naples, where most of the precious Pompeian
things, new and old, are heaped up. They still make but a poor show
there beside the treasures of Herculaneum, where the excavation of a few
streets and houses has yielded costlier and lovelier things than all the
lengths and breadths of Pompeii. But not for this would I turn against
Pompeii at the last moment, as it were, though my second visit had not
aesthetically enriched me beyond my first. I keep the vision of it under
that gray January sky, with Vesuvius smokeless in the background, and
the plan of the dead city, opener to the eye than ever it could have
been in life, inscribed upon the broadly opened area of the gentle
slopes within its gates.
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