All that I have seen of its shores are beautiful, though somewhat stern. Nothing common-place about those shores. The volcanic, the lurid bale fires of the lower earth, have everywhere made their mark upon the upper earth; those dark Plutonic rocks are never tiresome like the marshy sands of other shores. If the famous Orange woods sometimes seem somewhat monotonous, they compensate you when here and there, a sheltered spot, you find the true African vegetation, the Aloe and the Cactus, the hedge of Myrtle and Jessamine, and the wild and perfumed landes. Above, it is true, bald and frowning mountains loom, and their long offshoots run even into the very sea. "It seemed to me," said a traveller, "that I was between two atmospheres; the air above, and the air below." He describes the varied world of plants and animals which were reflected by the crystal mirror of that deep blue sea of Sicily. I was less fortunate off Genoa, where, gazing into the depths, I saw nothing but a desert. The dry and sterile rocks, the volcanic framing of the shores, dark as midnight, or of a still sadder and more ghastly and ghostlike white, showed me nothing but antique sarcophagi--reversed churches, reminding one, at times, of the cathedrals of Florence, or the leaning tower of Pisa. Sometimes, also, I seemed to see "strange monsters of the deep." Whales? Elephants? I do not know; but of real life not a trace. Such, however, as that beautiful sea is, it admirably nerves and hardens the dwellers on its shores, and the sailors on its bosom; it makes at once the most fiery and the most solid of races. Our giants of the North, are, perhaps, stronger, but certainly are not more enduring, and, as certainly, they do not so readily, or so safely acclimatise, as the seamen of Genoa, of Calabria, or of Greece, bronzed as they are, not by an accident of the skin, but by the permeation, the imbibation of the Sun's rays. A friend of mine, a learned physician, sends his pale patients from Paris or Lyons to take their Sun-baths in the South, and himself lies nude on the rocks, for hours together. He has only his head covered; as to all the rest of his person, he is bronzed as an African. The really sick will go to Sicily, to Algiers, to Madeira, in search of health. But the restorative of the pale, worn populations of our great cities, is best to be found in the more varied and more strengthening climates of the country which has given to Earth its most iron humanity, its heroes by sea and by land, and in the council chamber--that truly iron race of the Columbuses, the Dorias, the Massenas,--and the Garibaldis.