nd angry, against the insubstantial mole. All
day I gaze on these sights of beauty until it seems that nature herself
has taken on nobler forms forever more. When the mountain storm beats
the pane at midnight, or the distant lightnings awake me in the hour
before dawn, I can forget in what climate I am; but the oblivion is
conscious, and half a memory of childhood nights: in an instant comes
the recollection, "I am on the coasts, and these are the couriers, of
Etna."

The very rain is strange: it is charged with obscure personality; it is
the habitation of a new presence, a storm-genius that I have never
known; it in born of Etna, whence all things here have being and draw
nourishment. It is not rain, but the rain-cloud, spread out over the
valleys, the precipices, the sounding beaches, the ocean plain; it is
not a storm, but a season. It does not rise with the moist Hyades, or
ride with cloudy Orion in the Mediterranean night; it does not pass like
Atlantic tempests on great world-currents: it remains. Its home is upon
Etna; thence it comes and thither it returns; it gathers and disperses,
lightens and darkens, blows and is silent, and though it suffer the
clear north wind, or the west, to divide its veils with heaven, again it
draws the folds together about its abode. It obeys only Etna, who sends
it forth; then with clouds and thick darkness the mountain hides its
face: it is the Sicilian winter.

II

But Etna does not withdraw continuously from its children even in this
season. On the third day, at farthest, I was told it would bring back
the sun; and I was not deceived. Two days it was closely wrapped in
impenetrable gray; but the third morning, as I threw open my casement
and stepped out upon the terrace, I saw it, like my native winter,
expanding its broad flanks under the double radiance of dazzling clouds
spreading from its extreme summit far out and upward, and of the
snow-fields whose long fair drifts shone far down the sides. Villages
and groves were visible, clothing all the lower zone, and between lay
the plain. It seemed near in that air, but it is twelve miles away.
From the sea-dipping base to the white cone the slope measures more than
twenty miles, and as many more conduct the eye downward to the western
fringe--a vast bulk; yet one does not think of its size as he gazes; so
large a tract the eye takes in, but no more realizes than it does the
distance of the stars. High up, forests peer through