eBooks Base 2000

The room must have been anything but sad and funereal; on the contrary,
as cheerful a saloon, and as brilliant, if lighted up, as one could
desire to feast in. It contained several marble sarcophagi, covering
indeed almost the whole floor, and each of them as much as three or four
feet in length, and two much longer. The longer ones I did not
particularly examine, and they seemed comparatively plainer; but the
smaller sarcophagi were covered with the most delicately wrought and
beautiful bas-reliefs that I ever beheld; a throng of glad and lovely
shapes in marble clustering thickly and chasing one another round the
sides of these old stone coffins. The work was as perfect as when the
sculptor gave it his last touch; and if he had wrought it to be placed in
a frequented hall, to be seen and admired by continual crowds as long as
the marble should endure, he could not have chiselled with better skill
and care, though his work was to be shut up in the depths of a tomb
forever. This seems to me the strangest thing in the world, the most
alien from modern sympathies.


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