The atmosphere is really something more than a medium:  it is a drapery, woven, one could affirm, with colors, or dipped in oriental dyes.  One might account thus for the prismatic colors I have often seen on the horizon at noon, when the sun was pouring down floods of clear golden light.  The simple light here, if one could ever represent it by pen, pencil, or brush, would draw the world hither to bathe in it.  It is not thin sunshine, but a royal profusion, a golden substance, a transforming quality, a vesture of splendor for all these Mediterranean shores.

The most comprehensive idea of Sorrento and the great plain on which it stands, imbedded almost out of sight in foliage, we obtained one day from our boat, as we put out round the Capo di Sorrento, and stood away for Capri.  There was not wind enough for sails, but there were chopping waves, and swell enough to toss us about, and to produce bright flashes of light far out at sea.  The red-shirted rowers silently bent to their long sweeps; and I lay in the tossing bow, and studied the high, receding shore.  The picture is simple, a precipice of rock or earth, faced with masonry in spots, almost of uniform height from point to point of the little bay, except where a deep gorge has split the rock, and comes to the sea, forming a cove, where a cluster of rude buildings is likely to gather.  Along the precipice, which now juts and now recedes a little, are villas, hotels, old convents, gardens, and groves.  I can see steps and galleries cut in the face of the cliff, and caves and caverns, natural and artificial:  for one can cut this tufa with a knife; and it would hardly seem preposterous to attempt to dig out a cool, roomy mansion in this rocky front with a spade.

As we pull away, I begin to see the depth of the plain of Sorrento, with its villages, walled roads, its groves of oranges, olives, lemons, its figs, pomegranates, almonds, mulberries, and acacias; and soon the terraces above, where the vineyards are planted, and the olives also.  These terraces must be a brave sight in the spring, when the masses of olives are white as snow with blossoms, which fill all the plain with their sweet perfume.  Above the terraces, the eye reaches the fine outline of the hill; and, to the east, the bare precipice of rock, softened by the purple light; and turning still to the left, as the boat lazily swings, I have Vesuvius, the graceful dip into the plain, and the rise to the heights of Naples, Nisida, the shining houses of Pozzuoli, Cape Misenum, Procida, and rough Ischia.  Rounding the headland, Capri is before us, so sharp and clear that we seem close to it; but it is a weary pull before we get under its rocky side.