text:  What numberless sites of unparallelled interest are hence visible to the newly arrived and insatiable stranger! _Misenum Baiae Puteoli Gaurus Vesuvius Herculaneum Pompeii_! But the office of the cicerone here cannot--alas for Britain!--be confined to the old classics or the mere indication of places whose very _names_ are things to _conjure with_! In America we converse with nature only whose voice is in her woods and waterfalls; but in our threadbare Europe all _sites_ are _historical_ and chiefly in one sad sense--for Waterloo only brings up the rear of fields illustrated by the wholesale destruction of mankind! In the position which we now occupy volumes might be written--ay and _have been written_