ridge behind Sorrento, which
commands both bays. From there I can look down upon the Isles of the
Sirens. The top is a broad, windy strip of pasture, which falls off
abruptly to the Bay of Salerno on the south: a regular embankment of
earth runs along the side of the precipitous steeps, towards
Sorrento. It appears to be a line of defence for musketry, such as
our armies used to throw up: whether the French, who conducted siege
operations from this promontory on Capri, under Murat, had anything
to do with it, does not appear.

Walking there yesterday, we met a woman shepherdess, cowherd,
or siren--standing guard over three steers while they fed;
a scantily-clad, brown woman, who had a distaff in her hand, and spun
the flax as she watched the straying cattle, an example of double
industry which the men who tend herds never imitate. Very likely her
ancestors so spun and tended cattle on the plains of Thessaly. We gave
the rigid woman good-morning, but she did not heed or reply; we made
some inquiries as to paths, but she ignored us; we bade her good-day,
and she scowled at us: she only spun. She was so out of tune with the
people, and the gentle influences of this region, that we could only
regard her as an anomaly,--the representative of some perversity and
evil genius, which, no doubt, lurks here as it does elsewhere in the
world. She could not have descended from either of the groups of the
Sirens; for she was not fascinating enough to be fatal.

I like to look upon these islets or rocks of the Sirens, barren and
desolate, with a few ruins of the Roman time and remains of the
Middle-Age prisons of the doges of Amalfi; but I do not care to
dissipate any illusions by going to them. I remember how the Sirens
sat on flowery meads by the shore and sang, and are vulgarly supposed
to have allured passing mariners to a life of ignoble pleasure, and
then let them perish, hungry with all unsatisfied longings. The
bones of these unfortunates, whitening on the rocks, of which Virgil
speaks, I could not see. Indeed, I think any one who lingers long in
this region will doubt if they were ever there, and will come to
believe that the characters of the Sirens are popularly misconceived.
Allowing Ulysses to be only another name for the sun-god, who appears
in myths as Indra, Apollo, William Tell, the sure-hitter, the great
archer, whose arrows are sunbeams, it is a degrading conception of
him that he was obliged to lash himself to th