It was not, I trust, without some valuable additions to our stock of impressions in this line, that we reluctantly left that spot. Departing thence, we passed over a tract between the level of the brim of the caldron and the Black Ledge, in order to gain again the latter, most strangely rugged and wild, as if convulsion after convulsion had upheaved, and sunk, and rent, and piled the vast mineral and rocky masses; forming here great hills like the ruins of a hundred towers, and there deep indentations, while every block lay upon its fellow, ready to be dislodged, edge-wise, crosswise, endwise, sidewise, angle-wise, and every-wise, in the wildest confusion and variety possible, as if Typhoean giants had been hurling them at each other in war; or as when the warring angels "From their foundations loosening to and fro, Uptore the seated hills, with all their load, And sent them thundering upon their adversaries. Then hills amid the air encounter'd hills, Hurled to and fro with jaculation dire: Horrid confusion heap'd upon confusion rose." Rocks, too, in earthquake commotions, have been started from the perpendicular sides of the crater in this part, and have rolled down eight hundred or a thousand feet with a force, one might think, that would almost shake the world. When we had thus encompassed the crater, and had returned to the point where we first came down upon the Black Ledge, it was getting toward night, and I found myself so excessively heated and feverish, and throbbing with the headache, which most persons there suffer from, as to be unable to go for the castellated and Gothic specimens into some ovens that are found in the sides near by. Leaving, therefore, my companion and the natives to hunt for them, I proceeded slowly back, and toiled up, with difficulty, the steep side of this stupendous crater, which may be set down at a moderate calculation as not less than twelve miles in circumference, and one thousand feet deep. In the centre of this vast sunken amphitheatre of volcanic fire, "A dungeon horrible on all sides round, As one great furnace flaming," a man looks up to heaven, and to the seared walls of this great prison, and feels like a pigmy, or the veriest insect, in contrast with so mighty and terrible a work of the Lord God Almighty. The person who can go down into it, and come up safe from it, with a light mind, unthankful and unawed, is as wanting in some of the best attributes of mental manhood as of piety; and, let me say with Cowper, "I would not enter on my list of friends, Though graced with polished manners and fine sense," the man who should prove himself so brutishly insensible to the sublime vestiges of Divine power, and to the providential care of Divine goodness.