Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 12.djvu/311

 Rh villas, once excellently built, but now filled up with earth, and overgrown with olives. At last we caught a sight of Vesuvius, with a cloud of smoke resting on its brow.

Molo di Gäeta greeted us again with the richest of orange-trees: we remained there some hours. The creek before the town, which the tide flows up to, affords one of the finest views. Following the line of coast on the right, till the eye reaches at last the horn of the crescent, one sees at a moderate distance the fortress of Gäeta on the rocks. The left horn stretches out still farther, presenting to the beholder first of all a line of mountains, then Vesuvius, and, beyond all, the islands. Ischia lies before you, nearly in the centre.

Here I found on the shore, for the first time in my life, a starfish and an echinus thrown up by the sea; a beautiful green leaf (tethys foliacea), smooth as the finest bath-paper; and other remarkable rubble-stones, the most common being limestone, but occasionally also serpentine, jasper, quartz, granite, breccian pebbles, porphyry, marble of different kinds, and glass of a blue and green colour. The two last-mentioned specimens are scarcely productions of the neighourhoodneighbourhood [sic]. They are probably the debris of ancient buildings; and thus we have seen the waves before our eyes playing with the splendours of the ancient world. We tarried awhile, and pleased ourselves with meditating on the nature of man, whose hopes, whether in the civilised or savage state, are so soon disappointed.

Departing from Molo, the traveller still has a beautiful prospect, even after his quitting the sea. The last glimpse of it was a lovely bay, of which we took a sketch. We now came upon a good fruit country, with hedges of aloes. We noticed an aqueduct, which ran from the mountains over some nameless and orderless masses of ruins.

Next comes the ferry over the Garigliano. After