Sometimes the atmosphere is so dense that the objects are seen, like Captain Scoresby's ship, snatched up into the regions of the air, thirty or forty feet above the level of the sea; and in cloudy weather, nearer to the surface, bordered with vivid prismatic colours. Sometimes colonades of temples and churches, with cross-crowned spires, are all represented as floating on the sea, and by a sudden change of representation, the pillars are curved into arcades, and the crosses are bent into crescents, and all the edifices of the floating city undergo the most extraordinary and fantastic mutations. All these images are so distinct, and produce objects seemingly as palpable as they are visible, as sensible to touch as to sight, that the people of the country are firmly persuaded of their reality. They consider the edifices as the enchanted palaces of the fairy Morgana, and the moving objects as living things which inhabit them. Whenever the optic phenomenon occurs, they meet together in crowds, with an intense curiosity, mixed with awe and apprehension, which is not removed by an acquaintance with those natural causes, by which Mr. Swinburn and other foreign travellers, who have witnessed the scene, are able to account for it. The lakes of Ireland are equally susceptible of producing those vivid delusions, and the imagination of the people, as lively as that of the Sicilians, clothes them with an equal reality. There is scarcely a loch in that country, in which the remains of cities have not been at various times discovered; and many men have been met with who would solemnly swear they saw, and who no doubt did see, representations of them in certain states of the atmosphere. The most celebrated is that which occurs on the lake of Killarney. This romantic sheet of water is bounded on one side by a semi-circle of rugged mountains, and on the other by a flat morass, and the vapour generated in the mass, and broken by the mountains, continually represent the most fantastic objects; and often those on shore are transferred to the water, like the Fata Morgana.