Comes down upon the waters; all its hues,
From the rich sunset to the rising star,
Their magical variety diffuse:
And now they change: a paler shadow strews
Its mantle o'er the mountains; parting day
Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues
With a new color as it gasps away,
The last still loveliest, till--'tis gone--and all is grey."

_Childe Harold._

The charms of the Tyrrhenian Sea have been sung since the days of Homer.
That the Mediterranean generally, and its beautiful boundaries of Alps
and Apennines, with its deeply indented and irregular shores, forms the
most delightful region of the known earth, in all that relates to
climate, productions, and physical formation, will be readily enough
conceded by the traveller. The countries that border on this midland
water, with their promontories buttressing a mimic ocean--their
mountain-sides teeming with the picturesque of human life--their heights
crowned with watch-towers--their rocky shelves consecrated by
hermitages, and their unrivalled sheet dotted with sails, rigged, as it
might be, expressly to produce effect in a picture, form a sort of world
apart, that is replete with charms which not only fascinate the
beholder, but which linger in the memories of the absent like visions of
a glorious past.

Our present business is with this fragment of a creation that is so
eminently beautiful, even in its worst aspects, but which is so often
marred by the passions of man, in its best. While all admit how much
nature has done for the Mediterranean, none will deny that, until quite