Let the reader compare each of these extracts with the other, and form his own opinion of Mr. Bulwer's great powers and originality. These very remarkable coincidences are followed by others not less extraordinary and worthy of commemoration:
"But suddenly a duller shade fell over the air. Instinctively he turned to the mountain, and behold! one of the two gigantic crests, into which the summit had been divided, rocked and wavered to and fro; and then, with a sound the mightiness of which no language can describe, it fell from the burning base, and rushed, an avalanche of fire, down the sides of the mountain! At the same instant gushed forth a volume of blackest smoke, rolling on, over air, sea, and earth."
"Bright and gigantic through the darkness, which closed around it like the walls of hell, the mountain shone--a pile of fire! Its summit seemed riven in two; or rather above its surface there seemed to rise two monster-shapes, each confronting each, as demons contending for a world. These were of one deep blood-red hue of fire, which lighted up the whole atmosphere far and wide; but _below_, the nether part of the mountain was still dark and shrouded,--save in three places, adown which flowed, serpentine and irregular, rivers of the molten lava. Darkly red through the profound gloom of their banks, they flowed slowly on, as towards the devoted city. Over the broadest there seemed to spring a cragged and stupendous arch, from which, as from the jaws of hell, gushed the sources of the sudden Phlegethon."
Among the Death Cries of Pompeii, as we imagined them, is the following lyric:
"It bursts! it bursts! and thousand thunders blent, From the deep heart of agonizing earth, Knell, shatter, crash along the firmament, And new hells peopled startle into birth. Vesuvius sunders! pyramids of fire From fathomless abysses blast the sky; E'en desolating Ruin doth expire, And mortal Death in woe immortal die. Torrents like lurid gore, Hurled from the gulf of horror, pour, Like legion fiends embattled to the spoil, And o'er the temple domes, And joy's ten thousand homes, Beneath the whirlwind hail and storm of ashes boil."
Again says Mr. Bulwer, who boasts that he has succeeded where all others have failed: