and are blent
together on this shore; and the people are both blithe and gentle.
It is true that their passions are upon the surface, and that the
knife is ready to their hand. But the combination of fierceness and
softness in them has an infinite charm when one has learned by
observation that their lives are laborious and frugal, and that
their honesty is hardly less than their vigour. Happy indeed are
they--so happy that, but for crimes accumulated through successive
generations by bad governors, and but for superstitions cankering
the soul within, they might deserve what Shelley wrote of his
imagined island in 'Epipsychidion.'

_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 neighbourhood 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 grey
colours standing for Christians and Mahommedans 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
mule-back plodding along them look like Arabs on an infernal Sahara.
The very lizards which