s we saw last night have risen and spread, and shaken themselves
out into masses of summer clouds, which, floating upward, threaten to
envelop us upon our vantage-ground. Meanwhile they form a changeful
sea below, blotting out the plain, surging up into the valleys with
the movement of a billowy tide, attacking the lower heights like the
advance-guard of a besieging army, but daring not as yet to invade the
cold and solemn solitudes of the snowy Alps. These, too, in time, when
the sun's heat has grown strongest, will be folded in their midday
pall of sheltering vapour.

The very summit of Monte Generoso must not be left without a word of
notice. The path to it is as easy as the sheep-walks on an English
down, though cut along grass-slopes descending at a perilously sharp
angle. At the top the view is much the same, as far as the grand
features go, as that which is commanded from the cliff by the hotel.
But the rocks here are crowded with rare Alpine flowers--delicate
golden auriculas with powdery leaves and stems, pale yellow cowslips,
imperial purple saxifrages, soldanellas at the edge of lingering
patches of the winter snow, blue gentians, crocuses, and the frail,
rosy-tipped ranunculus, called glacialis. Their blooming time is
brief. When summer comes the mountain will be bare and burned, like
all Italian hills. The Generoso is a very dry mountain, silent and
solemn from its want of streams. There is no sound of falling waters
on its crags; no musical rivulets flow down its sides, led carefully
along the slopes, as in Switzerland, by the peasants, to keep their
hay-crops green and gladden the thirsty turf throughout the heat
and drought of summer. The soil is a Jurassic limestone: the rain
penetrates the porous rock, and sinks through cracks and fissures, to
reappear above the base of the mountain in a full-grown stream. This
is a defect in the Generoso, as much to be regretted as the want of
shade upon its higher pastures. Here, as elsewhere in Piedmont, the
forests are cut for charcoal; the beech-scrub, which covers large
tracts of the hills, never having the chance of growing into trees
much higher than a man. It is this which makes an Italian mountain
at a distance look woolly, like a sheep's back. Among the brushwood,
however, lilies-of-the-valley and Solomon's seals delight to grow;
and the league-long beds of wild strawberries prove that when the
laburnums have faded, the mountain will become a garden of feast