Scenes there are many in this wide world of ours which neither the craft of the scribe nor the skill of the painter can hope to reproduce, and this is one of them. It is awful in its grandeur, terrible in its sublimity, like Milton's Satan. It fascinates, and yet repels; charms the eye, while it chills the heart. One trembles with the sense of a dire terrific power, which at any moment may leap into the clay, and sweep the shattered island into destruction. But dreadful as it is by day, a deeper dread attaches to it by night, when the glare of those leaping fountains and rolling billows of molten lava is reflected athwart the darkness of heaven. And as the night advances and the darkness increases, a wonderful phantasmagoria of colour invests the fiery lake--jet black merges suddenly into palest grey; the deepest maroon changes, through cherry and scarlet, into the exquisitest hues of pink and blue and violet; the richest brown pales, through orange and yellow, into a delicate straw. Lady Brassey adds that there was yet another shade, which can be described only by the term "molten lava colour." The wreaths and wheeling clouds of smoke and vapour were by all these borrowed lights and tints translated into beautiful gleaming mist-like creations--belonging neither to earth nor air, but born of the molten flame and seething fire--which seemed splendidly and appropriately displayed against the amphitheatre of black peaks, pinnacles, and crags rising in the background. Of these great pieces would sometimes break off, and with a crash fall into the burning lake, there to be remelted and in due time thrown up anew.[33] The time spent at Honolulu by Lady Brassey was by no means wasted. She kept both eyes and ears well open, and suffered nothing to escape her which could throw any light on the manners and customs of the Hawaiian population. Though not a deep, she was a close and an accurate observer; and her book may advantageously be consulted by others than the "general reader."