t appear to be mourning robes. I was often
reminded of those wicked lines of BYRON'S on the gondola:

'For sometimes they contain a deal of fun,
Like mourning-coaches when the funeral's done.'

But let us turn from the animate to the inanimate, and visit the famous
AEtna, called by the Sicilians _Mongibello_. From the silence of Homer on
the subject, it is supposed that in his remote age the fires of the
mountain were unknown; but geologists have proof that they have a far more
ancient date. The Grecian poet Pindar is the first who mentions its
eruptions. He died four hundred and thirty-five years before CHRIST; from
that time to this, at irregular intervals, it has vomited forth its
destructive lavas. It is computed to be eleven thousand feet high. Its
base, more than an hundred miles in circumference, is interspersed with
numerous conical hills, each of which is an extinct crater, whose sides,
now shaded by the vine, the fig tree, and the habitations of man, once
glowed with the fiery torrent. Some of them are yet almost destitute of
vegetation; mere heaps of scoriae and ashes; but the more ancient ones are
richly clad with verdure. Let the reader imagine a mountain whose base is
as broad as the whole range of the Catskills, as seen from Catskill
village, rising to nearly three times their height; its lower parts are of
gentle ascent, but as it rises it becomes more and more steep, until it
terminates in a broken summit. Imagine it divided, as the eye ascends,
into three regions or belts: the first and lowest is covered with
villages, gardens, vineyards, olive-groves, oranges, and fields of grain
and flax, and the date-bearing palm. The second region, which commences
about four thousand feet above the sea, is called the _Regione Sylvosa_,
or woody region. Here chestnuts, hexes, and on the north pines of great
size flourish. This belt reaches to the elevation of about seven thousand
feet, where the _Regione Scoperta_, or bare region, commences. The lower
part of this is intermingled lava, rocks, volcanic sands, and snow; still
higher are vast fields of spotless snow, which centuries have seen
unwasted, with here and there a ridgy crag of black lava, too steep for
the snows to lodge upon; and toward the summit of the cone, dark patches
of scoriae and ashes, which, heated by the slumbering fires, defy the icy
blasts of these upper realms of air. It will readily be supposed that,
when viewed from a distance, Mount AEt