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 the mast when he went into action with the Sirens, like Farragut at Mobile, though for a very different reason.  We should be forced to believe that Ulysses was not free from the basest mortal longings, and that he had not strength of mind to resist them, but must put himself in durance; as our moderns who cannot control their desires go into inebriate asylums.

Mr. Ruskin says that “the Sirens are the great constant desires, the infinite sicknesses of heart, which, rightly placed, give life, and, wrongly placed, waste it away; so that there are two groups of Sirens, one noble and saving, as the other is fatal.”  Unfortunately we are all, as were the Greeks, ministered unto by both these groups, but can fortunately, on the other hand, choose which group we will listen to the singing of, though the strains are somewhat mingled; as, for instance, in the modern opera, where the music quite as often wastes life away, as gives to it the energy of pure desire.  Yet, if I were to locate the Sirens geographically, I should place the beneficent desires on this coast, and the dangerous ones on that of wicked Baiae; to which group the founder of Naples no doubt belonged.

Nowhere, perhaps, can one come nearer to the beautiful myths of Greece, the springlike freshness of the idyllic and heroic age, than on this Sorrentine promontory.  It was no chance that made these coasts the home of the kind old monarch Eolus, inventor of sails and storm-signals.  On the Telegrafo di Mare Cuccola is a rude signal-apparatus for communication with Capri,—­to ascertain if wind and wave are propitious for entrance to the Blue Grotto,—­which probably was not erected by Eolus, although he doubtless used this sightly spot as one of his stations.  That he dwelt here, in great content, with his six sons and six daughters, the Months, is nearly certain; and I feel as sure that the Sirens, whose islands were close at hand, were elevators and not destroyers of the primitive races living here.