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Jt/rNA. 
The ancient poets have exercised their descriptive powers in repre 
senting the eruptions of iEtna. Thus Virgil : 
“ By turns a pitchy cloud she rolls on high, 
By turns hot embers from her entrails fly. 
And flakes of mounting flames that lick the sky. 
Oft from her bowels massy rocks are thrown, 
And, shivered by fiery force, come piecemeal down. 
Oft liquid lakes of burning sulphur flow. 
Fed from the fiery springs that boil below.” 
Dry den's Translation, 
The following lines from Ovid are sufficiently curious and amusing 
“ Nor iEtna vomiting sulphureous fire 
Will ever belch ; for sulphur will expire. 
The veins exhausted of the liquid store : 
Time was she cast no flames in time will cast no more. 
For whether earth’s an animal, and air 
Imbibes, her lungs with coolness to repair. 
And what she sucks remits ; she still requires 
Inlets for air, and outlets for her fires : 
When tortur’d with convulsive fits she shakes. 
That motion chokes the vent, till other vent she makes : 
Or when the winds in hollow caves are clos’d, 
And subtle spirits find that way oppos’d, , 
They toss up flints in air ; the flints that hide 
The seeds of fire, thus toss’d in air, collide. 
Kindling the sulphur, till the fuel spent 
The cave is cool’d, and ’the fierce winds relent. 
Or whether sulphur catching fire, feeds on 
Its unctuous parts, till, all the matter gone. 
The flames no more ascend : for earth supplies 
The fat that feeds them ; and when earth denies 
That food, by length of time consum’d, the fire, 
Famish’d for want of fuel, must expire.” 
Garth's Translation. 
A fine description occurs in the first Pythian ode of Pindar : 
** Now, under sulph’rous Cuma’s sea-bound coast » 
And vast Sicilia lies his shaggy breast, 
By snowy .®tna, nurse of endless frost. 
The pillar’d prop of heaven, for ever press’d ; 
Forth from those nitrous caverns issuing rise 
Pure liquid fountains of tempestuous tire. 
And veil in ruddy mists the noonday skies, 
While wrapt in smoke the eddying flames aspire ; 
Or gleaming through the night with hideous roar 
Far o’er the redd’ning main huge rocky fragments pour. 
West's Translation, 
