the church itself is the most dreary and melancholy feature in the
landscape. No desolation resulting solely from the operations of
Nature, even in her least kindly mood, can ever suffice to speak to
the imagination as the change and decay of the works of man's hand
speak. To produce the effect of desolation in its highest degree man
must have at some former period been present on the scene, and the
remains of his work must be there to show that activity, life,
energy, has once existed where it exists no more. Nature is always
and everywhere progressive, and no sentiment of sadness belongs to
progress. Man's ruined work alone imparts the suggestion--(a
delusive one, indeed, but most forcible)--of falling back from the
better to the worse.

Wonderfully eloquent after this fashion are the temples of Paestum,
far away there to the south beyond Naples, on the flat strip of
miserably cultivated soil between the Apennines and the
Mediterranean. But they are too far gone in ruin and decay to speak
with so living a voice of sadness as does this old Byzantine church.
The human element is at Paestum too far away,--too utterly dead and
forgotten. In St. Apollinare life still lingers. Life, flickering in
its last spark, like the twinkling of a lamp which the next moment
will extinguish, is still there. Life more suggestive of death, than
any utter absence of life could be.

There are some dilapidated remains of conventual buildings on the
southern side of the church, mean, and of a date some thousand years
subsequent to that of the Basilica. They are nearly ruinous, but are
still--or were till within a few years--inhabited by one Capucin
friar, and one lay brother of the order, whose duty it was to mutter
a mass, with ague-chattering jaws, at the high altar, and act as