lack animation. Beyond
Villefranche the long hilly peninsula of Beaulieu and St. Hospice
stretches for fully three miles out into the bay, as green as an
emerald, with some twenty pleasure-boats usually clustering about its
shores, for the cork woods of St. Hospice are famous for picnics and
merrymaking, and its little hotel is renowned throughout Europe for
its fish-dinners.

Behind Villefranche, and continuing for fully fifty miles along the
Italian coast, rise the majestic mountains of the Riviera. Nothing
can be imagined more awe-striking than their appearance: their weird
shapes, their gloomy ravines, their fearful precipices, beetling over
the sea many thousand feet, their crags, peaks, chasms and desolate
grandeur produce a panorama of unsurpassed magnificence. But what
impresses one most is perceiving that, however barren they seem, they
are nevertheless thickly peopled. Towns, villages, convents, villas
and towers cover them in all directions, and in positions often truly
astonishing. Yonder is quite a large town clustering round the extreme
peak of a mountain at least three thousand feet high, and utterly bald
of vegetation; there is Eza perched upon a rock rising perpendicularly
from the sea, so that a stone thrown from the church-tower would fall
straight into the waves below through fifteen hundred feet of space;
far away in the distance, and close upon the shore, looking as white
as a band of pearls, are the villas of Mentone, and just in front of
them the castle-crowned heights of Monaco; yonder, almost touching the
clouds, is the famous sanctuary of Laghetto, and there is Augustus's
monument at La Tarbia--a solitary round tower, so solidly built that
it has resisted the ravages of eighteen centuries.

But what pen can describe the splendor of this scene? what brush
reproduce its ever-changing hues, its delicate mists, its broad
shadows, the deep blue of the sea, the rosy tint which Aurora casts
over all, or the vivid purples and crimsons which glow upon the
mountain-crags and strew the indigo of the Mediterranean with
jasper, ruby, Sapphire and gold when the sun falls to rest behind the
beautiful Cape of Antibes? Nature defies Art in such a spot as this,
and seems to triumph in bewildering our delighted senses with the
infinite variety of her products. Here her sea and mountains are
sublime in their grandeur, and at our feet are wild violets and heath
and rosemary and thyme, each, too, sublime in its