It is long and narrow, and has the appearance of a mighty
river winding among the mountains and the forests. We sailed from the
town of Como to a tract of country called the Tremezina, and saw the
various aspects presented by that part of the lake. The mountains
between Como and that village, or rather cluster of villages, are
covered on high with chestnut forests (the eating chestnuts, on which
the inhabitants of the country subsist in time of scarcity), which
sometimes descend to the very verge of the lake, overhanging it with
their hoary branches. But usually the immediate border of this shore is
composed of laurel-trees, and bay, and myrtle, and wild fig-trees, and
olives which grow in the crevices of the rocks, and overhang the
caverns, and shadow the deep glens, which are filled with the flashing
light of the waterfalls. Other flowering shrubs, which I can not name,
grow there also. On high, the towers of village churches are seen white
among the dark forests.

Beyond, on the opposite shore, which faces the south, the mountains
descend less precipitously to the lake, and altho they are much higher,
and some covered with perpetual snow, there intervenes between them and
the lake a range of lower hills, which have glens and rifts opening to
the other, such as I should fancy the abysses of Ida or Parnassus. Here
are plantations of olive, and orange, and lemon trees, which are now so
loaded with fruit, that there is more fruit than leaves--and vineyards.
This shore of the lake is one continued village, and the Milanese
nobility have their villas here. The union of culture and the untameable
profusion and loveliness of nature is here so close, that the line where
they are divided can hardly be discovered.

But the finest scenery is that of the Villa Pliniana; so called from a
fountain which ebbs and flows every three hours, described by the
younger Pliny, which is in the courtyard. This house, which was once a
magnificent palace, and is now half in ruins, we are endeavoring to
procure. It is built upon terraces raised from the bottom of the lake,
together with its garden, at the foot of a semicircular precipice,
overshadowed by profound forests of chestnut. The scene from the
colonnade is the most extraordinary, at once, and the most lovely that
eye ever beheld. On one side is the mountain, and immediately over you
are clusters of cypress-trees, of an astonishing height, which seem to
pierce the sky.

Above you, fro