After some time spent in Naples and vicinity, he devoted a month to the island of Sicily. He writes to Princess Galitzin, the granddaughter of the famous Marshal Suvorof, whom he had met in Florence: "Clear and beautiful are the skies in Sicily, and there is a warmth of tint about the sunsets unrivalled even in Italy. It resembles what one finds under the tropics; and so does the vegetation. It is rich and luxuriant. The palm begins to appear; the palmetto, the aloe, and the cactus adorn every woodside; the superb oleander bathes its roots in almost every brook; the pomegranate and a large species of convolvulus are everywhere seen. In short, the variety of flowers is greater than that of the prairies in the Western States of America, though I think their number is less. Our rudbeckia is, I think, more beautiful than the chrysanthemum coronarium which you see all over Sicily; but there are the orange and the lemon." Mr. Lowell travelled in Greece, and July 10 reached Athens, "that venerable, ruined, dirty little town," he wrote, "of which the streets are most narrow and nearly impassable; but the poor remains of whose ancient taste in the arts exceed in beauty everything I have yet seen in either Italy, Sicily, or any other portions of Greece." Late in September Mr. Lowell reached Smyrna, and visited the ruins of Magnesia, Tralles, Nysa, Laodicea, Tripolis, and Hierapolis. He writes to a friend in America; "I then crossed Mount Messogis in the rain, and descended into the basin of the river Hermus, visited Philadelphia, the picturesque site of Sardis, with its inaccessible citadel, and two solitary but beautiful Ionic columns." Early in December Mr. Lowell sailed from Smyrna in a Greek brig, coasting along the islands of Mitylene, Samos, Patmos, and Rhodes, arrived in Alexandria in the latter part of the month, and proceeded up the river Nile. On Feb. 12, 1835, he writes to his friends from the top of the great pyramid:-- "The prospect is most beautiful. On the one side is the boundless desert, varied only by a few low ridges of limestone hills. Then you have heaps of sand, and a surface of sand reduced to so fine a powder, and so easily agitated by the slightest breeze that it almost deserves the name of fluid. Then comes the rich, verdant valley of the Nile, studded with villages, adorned with green date-trees, traversed by the Father of Rivers, with the magnificent city of Cairo on its banks; but far narrower than one could wish, as it is bounded, at a distance of some fifteen miles, by the Arabian desert, and the abrupt calcareous ridge of Mokattam. Immediately below the spectator lies the city of the dead, the innumerable tombs, the smaller pyramids, the Sphinx, and still farther off and on the same line, to the south, the pyramids of Abou Seer, Sakkârà, and Dashoor."