n to the sea, its flaming golden waves.

With what facility you here forget all ugly objects! I believe I passed
at Castellamare some unsightly modern structures, a railroad station,
hotels, a guard-house, and a number of rickety vehicles hurrying along
in quest of fares. This is all effaced from my mind; nothing remains but
impressions of obscure porches with glimpses of bright courts filled
with glossy oranges and spring verdure, of esplanades with children
playing on them and nets drying, and happy idlers snuffing the breeze
and contemplating the capricious heaving of the tossing sea.

On leaving Castellamare the road forms a corniche[12] winding along the
bank. Huge white rocks, split off from the cliffs above, lie below in
the midst of the eternally besieging waves. On the left the mountains
lift their shattered pinnacles, fretted walls, and projecting crags, all
that scaffolding of indentations which strike you as the ruins of a line
of rocked and tottering fortresses. Each projection, each mass throws
its shadow on the surrounding white surfaces, the entire range being
peopled with tints and forms.

Sometimes the mountain is rent in twain, and the sides of the chasm are
lined with cultivation, descending in successive stages. Sorrento is
thus built on three deep ravines. All these hollows contain gardens,
crowded with masses of trees overhanging each other. Nut-trees, already
lively with sap, project their white branches like gnarled fingers;
everything else is green; winter lays no hand on this eternal spring.
The thick lustrous leaf of the orange-tree rises from amid the foliage
of the olive, and its golden apples glisten in the sun by thousands,
interspersed with gleams of the pale lemon; often in these shady lanes
do its glittering leaves flash out above the crest of the walls. This is
the land of the orange. It grows even in miserable court-yards,
alongside of dilapidated steps, spreading its luxuriant tops everywhere
in the bright sunlight. The delicate aromatic odor of all these opening
buds and blossoms is a luxury of kings, which here a beggar enjoys for
nothing.

I passed an hour in the garden of the hotel, a terrace overlooking the
sea about half-way up the bank. A scene like this fills the imagination
with a dream of perfect bliss. The house stands in a luxurious garden,
filled with orange and lemon-trees, as heavily laden with fruit as those
of a Normandy orchard; the ground at the foot of the tre