III. CUMÆ 289

I knew of Virgil, in that kind, became all at once true, when I saw the birdless lake;¹ for me also, the voice of it had teaching which was to be practically a warning law of future life:-

“Nec te

Nequidquam lucis Hecate præfecit Avernis.”²

The legends became true,-began to come true, I should have said,-trains of thought now first rising which did not take clear current till forty years afterwards;³ and in this first trickling, sorrowful in disappointment. “There were such places then, and Sibyls did live in them!-but is this all?”

Frightful enough, yes, the spasmodic ground-the boiling sulphur lake-the Dog’s grotto⁴ with its floor a foot deep in poisoned air that could be stirred with the hand. Awful, but also for the Delphi of Italy, ignoble. And all that was fairest in the whole sweep of isle and sea, I saw, as was already my wont, with precise note of its faults.

51. The common English traveller, if he can gather a black bunch of grapes with his own fingers, and have his bottle of Falernian brought him by a girl with black eyes, asks no more of this world, nor the next; and declares Naples a Paradise. But I knew, from the first moment when my foot furrowed volcanic ashes, that no mountain form or colour could exist in perfection when everything was made of scoria, and that blue sea was to be little boasted if it broke on black sand. And I saw also, with really wise anger, the horror of neglect in the governing power, which Mr. Gladstone found, forsooth, in the Neapolitan prisons!⁵ but which neither he nor any other Englishman, so far as I know, except Byron⁶ and I, saw to have

¹ [For the legend of “Avernus” (the “birdless” lake), see Lucretius, vi. 740, and Æneid, vi. 239.]

² [Æneid, vi. 118.]

³ [See the chapter on the Sibyls in Ariadne Florentina, Vol. XXII. pp. 443-455.]

⁴ [For a description of the place, see Vol. XXV. p. 234.]

⁵ [Compare, below, p. 428; and see Vol. XVIII. p. 549.]

⁶ [See Childe Harold, canto iv.]

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