WING-AND-WING.

CHAPTER I.

     “Filled with the face of heaven, which from afar
     Comes down upon the waters; all its hues,
     From the rich sunset to the rising star,
     Their magical variety diffuse: 
     And now they change:  a paler shadow strews
     Its mantle o’er the mountains; parting day
     Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues
     With a new color as it gasps away,
     The last still loveliest, till—­’tis gone—­and all is grey.”

     Childe Harold.

The charms of the Tyrrhenian Sea have been sung since the days of Homer.  That the Mediterranean generally, and its beautiful boundaries of Alps and Apennines, with its deeply indented and irregular shores, forms the most delightful region of the known earth, in all that relates to climate, productions, and physical formation, will be readily enough conceded by the traveller.  The countries that border on this midland water, with their promontories buttressing a mimic ocean—­their mountain-sides teeming with the picturesque of human life—­their heights crowned with watch-towers—­their rocky shelves consecrated by hermitages, and their unrivalled sheet dotted with sails, rigged, as it might be, expressly to produce effect in a picture, form a sort of world apart, that is replete with charms which not only fascinate the beholder, but which linger in the memories of the absent like visions of a glorious past.

Our present business is with this fragment of a creation that is so eminently beautiful, even in its worst aspects, but which is so often marred by the passions of man, in its best.  While all admit how much nature has done for the Mediterranean, none will deny that, until quite recently, it has been the scene of more ruthless violence, and of deeper personal wrongs, perhaps, than any other portion of the globe.  With different races, more widely separated by destinies than even by origin, habits, and religion, occupying its northern and southern shores, the outwork, as it might be, of Christianity and Mohammedanism, and of an antiquity that defies history, the bosom of this blue expanse has mirrored more violence, has witnessed more scenes of slaughter, and heard more shouts of victory, between the days of Agamemnon and Nelson, than all the rest of the dominions of Neptune together.  Nature and the passions have united to render it like the human countenance, which conceals by its smiles and godlike expression the furnace that so often glows within the heart, and the volcano that consumes our happiness.  For centuries, the Turk and the Moor rendered it unsafe for the European to navigate these smiling coasts; and when the barbarian’s power temporarily ceased, it was merely to give place to the struggles of those who drove him from the arena.