mpenetrability of shade; but what is the strange
red eye of light that hangs between earth and heaven? And, stranger
still, what is that phantasmal gleam of a lip of crags high in the air,
and that mysterious, moving, shifting light, like a pale flame,
above it? The gloomy spot is a rent in the side of Vesuvius where the
smouldering heat has burnt through the crust, and where a day or two
before I saw a viscid stream of molten liquor, with the flames playing
over it, creeping, creeping through the tunnelled ashes; and in the
light above is the lip of Vesuvius itself, with its restless furnace at
work, casting up a billowy swell of white oily smoke, while the glare of
the fiery pit lights up the underside of the rising vapours. A ghastly
manifestation, that, of sleepless and stern forces, ever at work upon
some eternal and bewildering task; and yet so strangely made am I, that
these fierce signal-fires, seen afar, but blend with the scents of the
musky alleys for me into a thrill of unutterable wonder.

There are hundreds of such pictures stored in my mind, each stamped upon
some sensitive particle of the brain, that cannot be obliterated, and
each of which the mind can recall at will. And that, too, is a fact of
surpassing wonder: what is the delicate instrument that registers, with
no seeming volition, these amazing pictures, and preserves them thus
with so fantastic a care, retouching them, fashioning them anew,
detaching from the picture every sordid detail, till each is as a lyric,
inexpressible, exquisite, too fine for words to touch?

Now it is useless to dictate to others the aims and methods of travel:
each must follow his own taste. To myself the acquisition of knowledge
and information is in these matters an entirely negligible thing. To me
the one and supreme object is the gathering of a gallery of pictures;
and yet that is not a definite object either, for the whimsical and
stubborn spirit refuses to be bound by any regulations in the matter.
It will garner up with the most poignant care a single vignette, a
tiny detail. I see, as I write, the vision of a great golden-grey
carp swimming lazily in the clear pool of Arethusa, the carpet of
mesembryanthemum that, for some fancy of its own, chose to involve the
whole of a railway viaduct with its flaunting magenta flowers and its
fleshy leaves. I see the edge of the sea, near Syracuse, rimmed with a
line of the intensest yellow, and I hear the voice of a guide e