hopelessness of ever truly recovering the life of a lost race. After all the labor of antiquary and the poet, nothing remains to be uttered but such moralizings as Sir Thomas Browne poured forth over the urns discovered at Old Walsingham: "What time the persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarism; not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits except we consult the provincial guardians, or tutelary observators." Death reigns over the peoples of the past, and we must fain be satisfied to cry with Raleigh: "O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised: thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of men, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, hic jacet." Even so. Yet while the cadence of this august rhetoric is yet in our ears, another voice is heard as of the angel seated by a void and open tomb, "Why seek ye the living among the dead?" The spirit of Hellas is indestructible, however much the material existence of the Greeks be lost beyond recovery; for the life of humanity is not many but one, not parcelled into separate moments, but continuous.

1

ETNA.

THE eruptions of Etna have blackened the whole land for miles in every direction. That is the first observation forced upon one in the neighborhood of Catania or Giarre or Bronte. From whatever point of view you look at Etna, it is always a regular pyramid, with long and gradually sloping sides, broken here and there by the excrescence of minor craters and dotted over with villages; the summit crowned with snow, divided into peak and cone, girdled with clouds, and capped with smoke, that shifts. shape as the wind veers, dominates a blue-black monstrous mass of outpoured lava. From the top of Monte Rosso, a subordinate volcano which broke into eruption in 1669, you can trace the fountain from which "the unapproachable river of purest fire" that nearly destroyed Catania issued. You see it still bubbling up like a frozen geyser from the flank of the mountain, whence the sooty torrent spreads, or rather sprawls, with jagged edges to the sea. The plain of Catania lies at your feet, threaded by the Simeto, bounded by the promontory of Syracuse and the mountains of Castro Giovanni. This huge amorphous blot upon the landscape may be compared to an ink-stain on a variegated tablecloth, or to the coal-districts marked upon a geological atlas, or to the heathen in a missionary map-the green and red and gray colors standing for Christians and Mohammedans and Jews of different shades and qualities. The lava, where it has been cultivated, is reduced to fertile sand, in which vines and fig-trees are planted their tender green foliage contrasting strangely with the sinister soil that makes them flourish. All the roads are black as

jet, like paths leading to coal-pits, and the country-folk on muleback plodding along them look like Arabs on an infernal Sahara. The very lizards which haunt the rocks are swart and smutty. Yet the flora of the district is luxuriant. The gardens round Catania, nestling into cracks and ridges of the stiffened flood, are marvellously brilliant with spurge and fennel and valerian. It is impossible to form a true conception of flower-brightness till one has seen these golden and crimson tints upon their ground of ebony, or to realize the blueness of the Mediterranean except in contrast with the lava where it breaks into the sea. Copses of frail oak and ash, undergrown with ferns of every sort; cactus-hedges, orange-trees grafted with lemons and laden with both fruits; olives of scarce two centuries' growth, and fig-trees knobbed with their sweet produce, overrun the sombre soil, and spread their boughs against the deep blue sea and the translucent amethyst of the Calabrian mountains. Underfoot, a convolvulus with large white blossoms, binding dingy stone to stone, might be compared to a rope of Desdemona's pearls upon the neck of Othello.

The villages are perhaps the most curious feature of this scenery. Their houses, rarely more than one story high, are walled, paved, and often roofed with the inflexible material which once was ruinous fire, and is now the servant of the men it threatened to destroy. The churches are such as might be raised in Hades to implacable Proserpine, such as one might dream of in a vision of the world turned into hell, such as Baudelaire in his fiction of a metallic landscape might have imagined under the influence of hasheesh. Their flights of steps are built of sharply cut black lava blocks no feet can wear. Their door-jambs and columns and pediments and carved work are wrought and sculptured of the same gloomy masonry. How forbidding are the acanthus-scrolls, how grim the skulls and cross-bones on these

portals! The bell-towers, again, are ribbed and beamed with black lava. A certain amount of the structure is whitewashed, which serves to relieve the funereal solemnity of the rest. In an Indian district each of these churches would be a temple, raised in vain propitiation to the demon of the fire above and below. Some pictures made by their spires in combination with the sad village-hovels, the snowy dome of Ætna, and the ever-smiling sea, are quite unique in their variety of suggestion and wild beauty.

The people have a sorrow-smitten and stern aspect. Some of the men in the prime of life are grand and haughty, with the cast-bronze countenance of Roman emperors. But the old men bear rigid faces of carved basalt, gazing fixedly before them as though at some time or other in their past lives they had met Medusa and truly Ætna in eruption is a Gorgon, which their ancestors have oftentimes seen shuddering, and fled from terrorfrozen. The white-haired old women, plying their spindle or distaff, or meditating in grim solitude, sit with the sinister set features of Fates by their doorways. The young people are very rarely seen to smile: they open hard, black, beaded eyes upon a world in which there is little for them but endurance or the fierceness of passions that delight in blood. Strangely different are these dwellers on the sides of Etna from the voluble, lithe sailors of Sciacca or Mazara, with their sunburnt skins and manycolored garments.

The Val del Bove-a vast chasm in the flank of Etna, where the very heart of the volcano has been riven and its entrails bared -is the most impressive spot of all this region. The road to it leads from Zafferana (so called because of its crocus-flowers) along what looks like a series of black moraines, where the lava torrents pouring from the craters of Etna have spread out, and reared themselves in stiffened ridges against opposing mountain buttresses. After toiling for about three hours over the dismal

waste, a point between the native rock of Ætna and the dead sea of lava is reached, which commands a prospect of the cone with its curling smoke surmounting a caldron of some four thousand feet in depth and seemingly very wide. The whole of this space is filled with billows of blackness, wave on wave, crest over crest, and dike by dike, precisely similar to a gigantic glacier, swarthy and immovable. The resemblance of the lava-flood to a glacier is extraordinarily striking. One can fancy one's self standing on the Belvedere at Macugnaga, or the Tacul point upon the Mer de Glace, in some nightmare, and finding to one's horror that the radiant snows and river-breeding ice-fields have been turned by a malignant deity to sullen, stationary cinders. It is a most hideous place, like a pit in Dante's Hell, disused for some unexplained reason, and left untenanted by fiends. The scenery of the moon, without atmosphere and without life, must be of this sort; and such, rolling round in space, 'may be some planet that has survived its own combustion. When the clouds, which almost alIways hang about the Val del Bove, are tumbling at their awful play around its precipices, veiling the sweet suggestion of distant sea and happier hills that should be visible, the horror of this view is aggravated. Breaking here and there, the billows of mist disclose forlorn tracts of jet-black desolation, wicked, unutterable, hateful in their hideousness, with patches of smutty snow above, and downward-rolling volumes of murky smoke. Shakespeare, when he imagined the damned spirits confined to "thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice," divined the nature of a glacier; but what line could he have composed adequate to shadow forth the tortures of a soul condemned to palpitate forever between the ridges of this thirsty and intolerable sea of dead fire? If the world-spirit chose to assume for itself the form and being of a dragon, of like substance to this, impenetrable, invulnerable, unapproachable, would be its hide. It requires no great stretch of