"Why does not man fall on his knees and adore the world, the mountains, the sea, the all? How it exalts the spirit to think that it is, and that it is conscious of the immense world and of itself! O Linda, I am still full of the morning; I still sojourn even on the sublime hell. Yesterday I rode in the morning with my _Bartolomeo_ through the rich, full garden avenue to the gay Portici, which links itself to the giant like Catana to Ætna. Ever the same great epic Greek feature running through this sublime land,--the same blending of the monstrous with the beautiful, of nature with men, of eternity with the moment; country-houses and a laughing plain opposite to the eternal death-torch; between old, holy temple-columns goes a merry dance, the common monk and the fisherman; the glowing blocks of the mountain tower up as a bulwark around vineyards, and beneath the living Portici dwells the hollow, dead Herculaneum; lava cliffs have grown out into the sea, and dark battering-rams lie cast among the flowers. The ascent was in the beginning refreshment to my soul; the long mountain was a conductor to the full cloud. Late at night, after an eternal ascent, without having enjoyed the evening sun, through whose red glow upon the ashes we were obliged to wade rapidly, we arrived here at the hermit's. The moon was not yet up; thy island was still invisible. Often it thundered under the floor of the apartment. Then was I all at once pleasantly reminded by the hermit of my old Schoppe, when he told me that a limping traveller with a wolf-dog had once said up here, 'In Vesuvius was the stall of the incessantly stamping thunder-steeds.' That could certainly after all have been no one but Schoppe.