96 TKAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND SPORT. 



as softly varied as the tones of a poet. It is not like 

 the Sirens' song. This still ocean has no thrilling 

 invitation to give, no secret pleasures to offer; but 

 round the storied coasts, where he has seen so much, 

 and where, perhaps, by times, a groan over human 

 misery has rent his great bosom, and driven him to 

 passion, he comes now in his milder mood with a dis- 

 passionate but tender pity. Has not he too seen 

 nights of sadness and misery, days of tempest and 

 tribulation, in which the sun went down at noon ? 

 But still the morning and the calm returned in their 

 time. The moral is too vast for human life, in which 

 there is neither time nor space for the everlasting 

 renovations of which nature is capable ; but there is 

 a certain healing in the sound, impersonal though it 

 is. . Few human creatures could pause here on Tiberio 

 Avithout an access of thought. It was here, close by, 

 that the victims of the wicked emperor were pitched 

 headlong from the terrific Salto into the soft remorse- 

 ful sea. And there, where Piccolo's innocent gourds 

 are growing, the walls that confine the little plot are 

 the walls of the Camarelli, infernal chambers, which 

 even the Eoman people, not too scrupulous, razed 

 wellnigh to the ground for horror of the vice once 

 practised there which has all given place, as we 

 have said, to the meek image of Our Lady of Succour 

 and her lonely little chapel. And was it not yonder, 

 on the cloudy skirts of Vesuvius, that in a moment, 

 in the twinkling of an eye, a city passed from life to 



