“Heavily rolls in the long deep swell of the ocean from the south‐west; and as it approaches, with its huge undulations driven up into foaming crests before the howling gale, each mighty wave breasts up against these rocks, as when an army of veteran legions assaults an impregnable fortress. Impregnable, indeed! for having spent its fury in a rising wall of mingled water and foam, it shoots up perpendicularly to an immense elevation, as if it would scale the heights it could not overthrow, only to be the next moment a broken ruin of water murmuring and shrieking in the moats below. The insular blocks and peaks receive the incoming surge in an overwhelming flood, which immediately, as the spent wave recedes, pours off through the interstices in a hundred beautiful jets and cascades; while in the narrow straits and passages the rushing sea boils and whirls about in curling sheets of snowy whiteness, curdling the surface; or where it breaks away, of the most delicate pea‐green hue, the tint produced by the bubbles seen through the water as they crowd to the air from the depths where they were formed—the evidence of the unseen conflict fiercely raging between earth and sea far below. “The shrieking gusts, as the gale rises yet higher and more furious, whip off the crests of the breaking billows, and bear the spray like a shower of salt sleet to the height where we stand; while the foam, as it forms and accumulates around the base of the headland, is seized by the same power in broad masses and carried against the sides of the projecting rocks, flying hither and thither like fleeces of wool, and adhering like so much mortar to the face of the precipice, till it covers great spaces, to the height of many fathoms above the highest range of the tide. The gulls flit wailing through the storm, now breasting the wind, and beating the air with their long wings as they make slow headway; then yielding the vain essay, they turn and are whirled away, till, recovering themselves, they come up again with a sweep, only to be discomfited. Their white forms, now seen against the leaden‐grey sky, now lost amidst the snowy foam, then coming into strong relief against the black rock; their piping screams now sounding close against the ear, then blending with the sounds of the elements, combine to add a wildness to the scene which was already sufficiently savage. “But the spring‐tide is nearly at its lowest; a rocky path leads down from our eminence to a recess in the precipice, whence in these conditions access may be obtained to a sea cavern that we may possibly find entertainment in exploring.” Madame de Gasparin, in her visit to Italy, thus describes her impressions of a thunderstorm, the reveries of an enthusiastic poet‐traveller.(52) She says:—“Last night a storm burst over Chiaveri. Three tempests in one! and we in the very centre of the action.