d nations through more than forty centuries--from the first rude
voyage of Jason and his Argonauts, to the thunders of Navarino that
heralded the second birth of Greece! You cannot wonder we grew romantic;
but short space was left for sentiment in the burning sun, with Genoa to
be reached before night. The mountain we crossed is called the Bochetta,
one of the loftiest of the sea-Alps (or Apennines)--the road winds
steeply down towards the sea, following a broad mountain rivulet, now
perfectly dried up, as nearly every stream among the mountains is. It
was a long way to us; the mountains seemed as if they would never unfold
and let us out on the shore, and our weary limbs did penance enough for
a multitude of sins. The dusk was beginning to deepen over the bay and
the purple hues of sunset were dying away from its amphitheatre of
hills, as we came in sight of the gorgeous city. Half the population
were out to celebrate a festival, and we made our entry in the triumphal
procession of some saint.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

SCENES IN GENOA, LEGHORN AND PISA.

Have you ever seen some grand painting of a city, rising with its domes
and towers and palaces from the edge of a glorious bay, shut in by
mountains--the whole scene clad in those deep, delicious, sunny hues
which you admire so much in the picture, although they appear unrealized
in Nature? If so, you can figure to yourself Genoa, as she looked to us
at sunset, from the battlements west of the city. When we had passed
through the gloomy gate of the fortress that guards the western
promontory, the whole scene opened at once on us in all its majesty. It
looked to me less like a real landscape than a mighty panoramic
painting. The battlements where we were standing, and the blue mirror of
the Mediterranean just below, with a few vessels moored near the shore,
made up the foreground; just in front lay the queenly city, stretching
out to the eastern point of the bay, like a great meteor---this point,
crowned with the towers and dome of a cathedral representing the
nucleus, while the tail gradually widened out and was lost among the
numberless villas that reached to the top of the mountains behind. A
mole runs nearly across the mouth of the harbor, with a tall light-house
at its extremity, leaving only a narrow passage for vessels. As we
gazed, a purple glow lay on the bosom of the sea, while far beyond the
city, the eastern half of the mountain crescent around the gulf wa