alleys or the
Apennines, but very rarely in Switzerland. It is of a pure green
colour, absolutely like Indian jade, foaming round the granite
boulders, and gliding over smooth slabs of polished stone, and eddying
into still, deep pools fringed with fern. Monte d'Oro, one of the
largest mountains of Corsica, soars above, and from his snows the
purest water, undefiled by glacier mud or the _debris_ of
avalanches, melts away. Following the stream, we rise through the
macchi and the chestnut woods, which grow more sparely by degrees,
until we reach the zone of beeches. Here the scene seems suddenly
transferred to the Pyrenees; for the road is carried along abrupt
slopes, thickly set with gigantic beech-trees, overgrown with pink and
silver lichens. In the early spring their last year's leaves are still
crisp with hoar-frost; one morning's journey has brought us from the
summer of Ajaccio to winter on these heights, where no flowers are
visible but the pale hellebore and tiny lilac crocuses. Snow-drifts
stretch by the roadside, and one by one the pioneers of the vast
pine-woods of the interior appear. A great portion of the pine-forest
(_Pinus larix_, or Corsican pine, not larch) between Bocognano
and Corte had recently been burned by accident when we passed by.
Nothing could be more forlorn than the black leafless stems and
branches emerging from the snow. Some of these trees were mast-high,
and some mere saplings. Corte itself is built among the mountain
fastnesses of the interior. The snows and granite cliffs of Monte
Rotondo overhang it to the north-west, while two fair valleys lead
downward from its eyrie to the eastern coast. The rock on which it
stands rises to a sharp point, sloping southward, and commanding the
valleys of the Golo and the Tavignano. Remembering that Corte was the
old capital of Corsica, and the centre of General Paoli's government,
we are led to compare the town with Innsprueck, Meran, or Grenoble.
In point of scenery and situation it is hardly second to any of these
mountain-girdled cities; but its poverty and bareness are scarcely
less striking than those of Bocognano.

The whole Corsican character, with its stern love of justice, its
furious revengefulness and wild passion for freedom, seems to be
illustrated by the peculiar elements of grandeur and desolation in
this landscape. When we traverse the forest of Vico or the rocky
pasture-lands of Niolo, the history of the Corsican national heroes,