priety in their presence, though he knows perfectly well that
there is a great deal of necessity; and, therefore he builds them.
Where? On rocks whose sides are one mass of buttresses, of precisely the
same form; on rocks which are cut and cloven by basalt and lava dikes
of every size, and which, being themselves secondary, wear away
gradually by exposure to the atmosphere, leaving the intersecting dikes
standing out in solid and vertical walls, from the faces of their
precipices. The eye passes over heaps of scoriae and sloping banks of
ashes, over the huge ruins of more ancient masses, till it trembles for
the fate of the crags still standing round; but it finds them ribbed
with basalt like bones, buttressed with a thousand lava walls, propped
upon pedestals and pyramids of iron, which the pant and the pulse of the
earthquake itself can scarcely move, for they are its own work; it
climbs up to their summits, and there it finds the work of man; but it
is no puny domicile, no eggshell imagination, it is in a continuation of
the mountain itself, inclined at the same slope, ribbed in the same
manner, protected by the same means against the same danger; not,
indeed, filling the eye with delight, but, which is of more importance,
freeing it from fear, and beautifully corresponding with the prevalent
lines around it, which a less massive form would have rendered, in some
cases, particularly about Etna, even ghastly. Even in the long and
luxuriant views from Capo di Monte, and the heights to the east of
Naples, the spectator looks over a series of volcanic eminences,
generally, indeed, covered with rich verdure, but starting out here and
there in gray and worn walls, fixed at a regular slope, and breaking
away into masses more and more rugged towards Vesuvius, till the eye
gets thoroughly habituated to their fortress-like outlines.

[Illustration: Fig. 10. Petrarch's Villa; Arqua.--1837.]

140. Throughout the whole of this broken country, and, on the summits of
these volcanic cones, rise innumerable villas; but they do not offend
us, as we should have expected, by their attestation of cheerfulness of
life amidst the wrecks left by destructive operation, nor hurt the eye
by non-assimilation with the immediate features of the landscape: but
they seem to rise prepared and adapted for resistance to, and endurance
of, the circumstances of their position; to be inhabited by beings of
energy and force sufficient to decree and to car