rica are still too pregnant of vapors and exhalations, not to impair
the purity of the native air. If I have seen much of the Mediterranean,
neither am I a stranger to these coasts. While there are so many points of
resemblance in their climates, there are also many and marked causes of
difference."

"Teach us, then, what forms these distinctions, that, in speaking of our
bay and skies, we may not be led into error."

"You do me honor, lady; I am of no great schooling, and of humble powers
of speech. Still, the little that observation may have taught me, shall
not be churlishly withheld. Your Italian atmosphere, taking the humidity
of the seas, is sometimes hazy. Still water in large bodies, other than in
the two seas, is little known in those distant countries. Few objects in
nature are drier than an Italian river, during those months when the sun
has most influence. The effect is visible in the air, which is in general
elastic, dry, and obedient to the general laws of the climate. There
floats less exhalation, in the form of fine and nearly invisible vapor,
than in these wooded regions. At least, so he of whom I spoke, as one who
guided my youth, was wont to say."

"You hesitate to tell us of our skies, our evening light, and of our
bay?"

"It shall be said, and said sincerely--Of the bays, each seems to have
been appropriated to that for which nature most intended it.--The one is
poetic, indolent, and full of graceful but glorious beauty; more pregnant
of enjoyment than of usefulness. The other will, one day, be the mart of
the world!"

"You still shrink from pronouncing on their beauty;" said Alida,
disappointed, in spite of an affected indifference to the subject.

"It is ever the common fault of old communities to overvalue themselves,
and to undervalue new actors in the great drama of nations, as men long
successful disregard the efforts of new aspirants for favor;" said
Seadrift, while he looked with amazement at the pettish eye of the
frowning beauty. "In this instance, however, Europe has not so greatly
erred. They who see much resemblance between the bay of Naples and this of
Manhattan, have fertile brains; since it rests altogether on the
circumstance that there is much water in both, and a passage between an
island and the main-land, in one, to resemble a passage between two
islands in the other. This is an estuary, that a gulf; and while the
former has the green and turbid water of a shelving shore a