Lord Nevil remained long exhausted after the trying recital which had thrilled him to the soul. Corinne gently strove to revive him. The river of flame which fell from Vesuvius fearfully excited his imagination. She availed herself of this, in order to draw him from his own recollections, and begged him to walk with her on the banks of once inflamed lava. The ground they crossed glowed beneath their steps, and seemed to warm them from a spot so hostile to all life. Man could not here call himself "lord of the creation;" it seemed escaping from his tyranny by suicide. The torrent of fire is of a dusky hue, yet when it lights a vine, or any other tree, it sends forth a clear bright blaze; but the lava itself is of that lurid tint, which might represent infernal fire; it rolls on with a crackling sound, that alarms the more from its slightness--cunning seems joined with strength; thus secretly steals the tiger to his prey. This cataract, though so deliberate, loses not a moment; if it encounter a high wall, or anything that opposes its progress, it heaps against the obstacle its black and bituminous flood, and buries it beneath burning waves. Its course is not so rapid but that men may fly before it; but like Time, it overtakes the old or the imprudent, who, from its silent approach, think to escape without exertion. Its brightness is such that earth is reflected in the sky, which appears lapped in perpetual lightning; this, too, is mirrored by the sea, and all nature clothed in their threefold fires. The wind is heard, and its effect perceived, as it forms a whirlpool of flame round the gulf whence the lava issues; one trembles to guess at what is passing in the bosom of the earth, whose fury shakes the ground beneath our steps. The rocks about the source of this flood are covered with pitch and sulphur, whose colors, indeed, might suit the home of fiends--a livid green, a tawny brown, and an ensanguined red, form just that dissonance to the eye of which the ear were sensible, if pierced by the harsh cries of witches, conjuring down the moon from heaven. All that is near the volcano bears so supernal an aspect, that doubtless the poets thence drew their portraitures of hell. There we may conceive how man was first persuaded that a power of evil existed to thwart the designs of Providence. Well may one ask, in such a scene, if mercy alone presides over the phenomena of creation; or if some hidden principle forces natures, like her sons, into ferocity? "Corinne," sighed Nevil, "is it not from hence that sorrow comes? Does the angel of death take wing from yon summit? If I beheld not thy heavenly face, I should lose all memory of the charms with which the Eternal has adorned the earth; yet this spectacle, frightful as it is, overawes me less than conscience. All perils may be braved; but how can the dead absolve us for the wrongs we did them living? Never, never. Ah, Corinne! what need of fires like these? The