f a momentary glance. Sicily
lay at our feet, with all its 'many folded' mountains, its plains, its
promontories, and its bays; and round all, the sea stretched far and wide
like a lower sky; the Lipari islands, Stromboli and its volcano, floating
upon it like small dusky clouds; and the Calabrian coast visible, I should
suppose, for two hundred miles, like a long horizontal bank of vapor! As
the sun rose, the great pyramidal shadow of AEtna was cast across the
island, and all beneath it rested in twilight-gloom. Turning from this
wonderful scene, we looked down into the crater, on whose verge we lay. It
was a fearful sight, apparently more than a thousand feet in depth, and a
mile in breadth, with precipitous and in some places overhanging sides,
which were varied with strange and discordant colors. The steeps were rent
into deep chasms and gulfs, from which issued white sulphurous smoke, that
rose and hung in fantastic wreaths about the horrid crags; thence
springing over the edge of the crater, seemed to dissipate in the clear
keen air. I was somewhat surprised to perceive several sheets of snow
lying at the very bottom of the crater, a proof that the internal fires
were in a deep slumber. The edge of the crater was a mere ridge of scoriae
and ashes, varying in height; and it required some care, in places, to
avoid falling down the steep on one hand, or being precipitated into the
gulf on the other. The air was keen; but fortunately there was little
wind; and after spending about an hour on the summit, we commenced our
descent.

We varied our course from the one we took on ascending, and visited an
altar erected to Jupiter by the ancients, now called the _Torre del
Filosofo_. Soon after we came upon the verge of a vast crater, the period
of whose activity is beyond the earliest records of history. _Val di
Bove_, as it is called, is a tremendous scene. Imagine a basin several
miles across, a thousand feet in depth at least, with craggy and
perpendicular walls on every side; its bottom broken into deep ravines and
chasms, and shattered pinnacles, as though the lava in its molten state
had been shaken and tossed by an earthquake, and then suddenly congealed.
It is into this ancient crater that the lava of the most recent eruption
is descending. It is fortunate that it has taken that direction.

In another and concluding number, the reader's attention will be directed
to the _Architectural Antiquities of Sicily_, especia