Rome, while the other was violet like the flower of
the lilac, the image of a vast city appeared on the sea. It was
an illusion, doubtless; but it had all the appearance of
reality. You saw clearly the domes glancing--dazzling lines of
palaces--quays flooded by a soft and serene light; on the right
and the left the waves were seen to sparkle and enclose it on
either side: it was Venice or Malta reposing in the midst of
the waters. The illusion was produced by the reflection of the
moon, when her rays fell perpendicularly on the waters; nearer
the eye, the radiance spread and expanded in a stream of gold
and silver between two shores of azure. On the left, the gulf
extended to the summit of a long and obscure range of serrated
mountains; on the right opened a narrow and deep valley, where
a fountain gushed forth beneath the shade of aged trees;
behind, rose a hill, clothed to the top with olives, which in
the night appeared dark, from its summit to its base--a line of
Gothic towers and white houses broke the obscurity of the wood,
and drew the thoughts to the abodes, the joys, and the
sufferings of man. Further off, in the extremity of the gulf,
three enormous rocks rose, like pillars without base, from the
surface of the waters--their forms were fantastic, their
surface polished like flints by the action of the waves; but
those flints were mountains--the remains, doubtless, of that
primeval ocean which once overspread the earth, and of which
our seas are but a feeble image."--(II. 66.)

A rocky bay on the same romantic coast, now rendered accessible to
travellers by the magnificent road of the Corniche, projected, and in
part executed by Napoleon, furnishes another subject for this exquisite
pencil:--

"A mile to the eastward on the coast, the mountains, which
there dip into the sea, are broken as if by the strokes of
enormous clubs--huge fragments have fallen, and are strewed in
wild confusion at the foot of the cliffs, or amidst the blue
and green waves of the sea, which incessantly laves them. The
waves break on these huge masses without intermission, with a
hollow and alternating roar, or rise up in sheets of foam,
which besprinkle their hoary fronts. These masses of
mountains--for they are too large to be called rocks--are piled
and heaped toget