Etna, like deep fog upon the ocean; and then, inevitably, my eyes seek
the double summit of the Taorminian mountain, rising nigh at hand a
thousand feet, almost sheer, less than half a mile westward. The nearer
height, precipice-faced, towers full in front with its crowning ruined
citadel, and discloses, just below the peak, on an arm of rock toward
its right, a hermitage church among the heavily hanging mists. The other
horn of the massive hill, somewhat more remote, behind and to the old
castle's left, exposes on its slightly loftier crest the edge of a
hamlet. It, too, is cloud-wreathed--the lonely crag of Mola. Over these
hilltops, I know, mists will drift and touch all day; and often they
darken threateningly, and creep softly down the slopes, and fill the
next-lying valley, and roll, and lift again, and reveal the flank of
Monte d'Oro northward on the far-reaching range. As I was walking the
other day, with one of these floating showers gently blowing in my face
down this defile, I noticed, where the mists hung in fragments from the
cloud out over the gulf, how like air-shattered arches they groined the
profound ravine; and thinking how much of the romantic charm which
delights lovers of the mountains and the sea springs from such Gothic
moods of nature, I felt for a moment something of the pleasure of
recognition in meeting with this northern and familiar element in the
Sicilian landscape.

One who has grown to be at home with nature cannot be quite a stranger
anywhere on earth. In new lands I find the poet's old domain. It is not
only from the land-side that these intimations of old acquaintance come.
When my eyes leave, as they will, the near girdle of rainy mountain
tops, and range home at last upon the sea, something familiar is there
too,--that which I have always known,--but marvellously transformed and
heightened in beauty and power. Such sudden glints of sunshine in the
offing through unseen rents of heaven, as brilliant as in mid-ocean, I