the vast banks of southward-lying cloud that envelop Etna, like deep fog upon the ocean; and then, inevitably, my eyes seek the double summit of the Taorminian mountain, rising nigh at hand a thousand feet, almost sheer, less than half a mile westward. The nearer height, precipice-faced, towers full in front with its crowning ruined citadel, and discloses, just below the peak, on an arm of rock toward its right, a hermitage church among the heavily hanging mists. The other horn of the massive hill, somewhat more remote, behind and to the old castle's left, exposes on its slightly loftier crest the edge of a hamlet. It, too, is cloud-wreathed—the lonely crag of Mola. Over these hilltops, I know, mists will drift and touch all day; and often they darken threateningly, and creep softly down the slopes, and fill the next-lying valley, and roll, and lift again, and reveal the flank of Monte d'Oro northward on the far-reaching range. As I was walking the other day, with one of these floating showers gently blowing in my face down this defile, I noticed, where the mists hung in fragments from the cloud out over the gulf, how like air-shattered arches they groined the profound ravine; and thinking how much of the romantic charm which delights lovers of the mountains and the sea springs from such Gothic moods of nature, I felt for a moment something of the pleasure of recognition in meeting with this northern and familiar element in the Sicilian landscape.

One who has grown to be at home with nature cannot be quite a stranger anywhere on earth. In new lands I find the poet's old domain. It is not only from the land-side that these intimations of old acquaintance come. When my eyes leave, as they will, the near girdle of rainy mountain tops, and range home at last upon the sea, something familiar is there too,—that which I have always known,—but marvellously transformed and heightened in beauty and power. Such sudden glints of sunshine in the offing through unseen rents of heaven, as brilliant as in mid-ocean, I have beheld a thousand times, but here they remind me rather of cloud-lights on far western plains; and where have I seen those still tracts of changeful colour, iridescent under the silvery vapours of noon; or, when the weather freshens darkens, those whirlpools of pure emerald in the gray expanse of storm? They seem like memories of what has been, made fairer. One recurring scene has the same fascination for my eyes as the fishers' lights. It is a simple picture: only an arm of mist thrusting out from yonder lowland by the little cape, and making a near horizon, where, for half an hour, the waves break with great dashes of purple and green, deep and angry, against the insubstantial mole. All day I gaze 

 Prev. P 2/137 next