When the mountain is full-grown, and its days of activity are done, for a while it reigns, a figure of perfect grace, a very queen for elegance and beauty of form. Who that has ever seen Vesuvius can deny this fact. Probably no snowy peaks in the world are more absolutely perfect in form than the white-clad giant volcanoes of Kamchatka, or, on a smaller scale, the peerless Fuji of Japan. The outline of the cone, gently rising from the foot, and then steepening in its incomparable logarithmic curve, is the gracefullest that nature produces on a large scale. Even the effulgent domes of the greatest cumulous clouds that, on a faultless summer afternoon, soar into the clearest blue sky, are not to be compared with volcanoes at their best. These have the aspect of works of art, made, as it were, expressly to incorporate an idea of beauty. They possess the symmetry of a fine crystal, but at the same time, a grace far beyond what is possible to any crystalline form. And then, how they soar! How their beautiful heads seem almost to float in the blue! How symmetrically the mists gather about their summits! At one time the base will vanish in the bright opacity of the lower air, and the top will be seen in sharp distinctness, like a floating island in the sky. At another, the summit will fade away, and the shadowed base will fill the vision with its purple solidity. And always there hangs about a volcano the memory of its fire-begetting, and the suspicion that all may not yet be over. It is, as it were, an inscribed finger-post, warning us of the molten core within. It is at once a memorial and a monition to those that dwell beneath it. It is the witness of past and the herald of future convulsions; yet, being such, it is itself in form the peacefullest and tenderest in nature. No woman's robe droops more delicately over her bosom than droops the once molten drapery of a volcano. Its aspect bears a double and opposed suggestiveness. Such are volcanoes in the day of their perfection, before the denuding forces have made inroads on the symmetry of their form.
[Illustration: 69. MONTREUX, LAKE OF GENEVA.]
Yet even then it is not well to approach them too closely, unless you would have the sense of their beauty supplanted by a different kind of emotion. The nearer you approach a snow-mountain, such as Mont Blanc, and the more intimately you penetrate its white recesses, and acquaint yourself with its details of crevasse and sérac, the more conscious are you of the perfection of its finish and the loveliness of its details. It is not so with a volcano at any time of its career. When it is newly fashioned and the lava streams are still in movement and smoking upon its sides, and the cinders and ashes of its recent ejection are piled upon it, to approach them is to behold sights more provocative of horror than of admiration. They appal, they create astonishment, but they do not attract. Cast your eye over the remarkable series of photographs by Dr. Tempest Anderson, published under the title "Volcanic Studies," and you will have ample proof of this. Consider the Icelandic gorges, the outer crater of Teneriffe, or the views of recent volcanic energies displayed in St. Vincent--the mud-rivers, the sand-strewn valleys; here is enough to interest and more than enough to appal, but the kind of beauty associated with a distant view of a volcano is absent. There is no grace, no charm, none of the sweet feminine outline which makes volcanoes the queens and fair ladies among hills.