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Nor is its classical lore the only feature of the Bay of Baiae, for though its actual scenery cannot compare with the grandeur of Capri nor its vegetation with the rich luxuriance of Sorrento, yet these shores have a quiet beauty of their own.
At Herculaneum there evidently lived persons of greater literary and artistic I refinement than at Pompeii, and the discoveries from that only very partially excavated town make an incalculably rich show of their own. What then would be the case with Naples, Baiae, the resorts all along the coast as far as the Tiber, the luxurious villas on the Alban Hills, and the great metropolis itself?
Here, when once he had made it clear to a succession of rhetorical boatmen that he was not to be tempted on to the sea, he could sit as idly and as long as he liked, looking across the sapphire bay and watching the bright sails glide hither and thither With the help of sunlight and red wine, he could imagine that time had gone back twenty centuries that this was not Pozzuoli, but Puteoli; that over yonder was not Baia, but Baiae; that the men among the shipping talked to each other in Latin, and perchance of the perishing Republic.
It contains a crater in a state of subdued activity, called the Solfatara; an extinct volcano having a large crater called Monte Barbaro; and Lake Avernus, also supposed to be an extinct volcanic crater. Between Monte Barbaro and the sea, there was formerly a fiat piece of ground bordering on the Lucrine Lake, which is separated from the Bay of Baiae by a narrow strip of shingle.
The hot sulphur baths on the Lucrine shore formed of course only a shallow excuse for the annual migration of Roman fashionables to Baiae, where blue-blooded senators and pushing plutocrats indulged in fierce social struggles for individual pre-eminence.
I wonder if our society is getting to dance and frolic along like that of old at Baiae!" "Oh, Mr. King, this is an excursion. I assure you the American girl is a serious and practical person most of the time. You've been away so long that your standards are wrong. She's not nearly so knowing as she seems to be."
By the seaside, especially in a much-frequented resort like Baiae, the room was more limited and the equipment modified. The extensive garden would be absent, and the height of the building increased by a second or even a third storey. It was no uncommon thing for such a "villa," as it was called, to stand out on a promontory, where it could be greeted by the sea on either side.
She missed the brilliant errors, the daring aspirations, even the animated gestures and eager eloquence, that had interested and enamoured her in the loiterer by the shores of Baiae, or amidst the tomb-like chambers of Pompeii.
The years that had vanished were so insubstantial in memory; now and then, what was it that divided the two? This that was to-day a fact, was it not equally so when Cecily walked by his side at Baiae? That which is to come, already is.
Difficult was it then and there to guess the causes why the tradition of the place wore so gloomy and stern a hue; why, in those smiling plains, for miles around to Baiae and Misenum the poets had imagined the entrance and thresholds of their hell their Acheron, and their fabled Styx: why, in those Phlegrae, now laughing with the vine, they placed the battles of the gods, and supposed the daring Titans to have sought the victory of heaven save, indeed, that yet, in yon seared and blasted summit, fancy might think to read the characters of the Olympian thunderbolt.
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