THE SANDWICH ISLANDS.* EVERY one who loves scenery and the

more detailed beauties of nature, and especially those who do not shrink from the awe-inspiring marvels of natural phenomena on a grand scale, should read this remarkably fascinating and beautifully written book, by a brave and cultivated lady who has seen all that she describes. It is very important to bear this in mind, for otherwise we might be inclined to attribute the narrative to the vivid fancy of genius. It is so entirely beyond the limits of the experience of even great travellers ; and we gather from the book that the very residents in the Hawaiian group do not themselves often ex- hibit the qualities of enterprise, courage, and endurance necessary to carry them to the summits of their extinct volcanoes, or to the edge of the awful gulf of solid, seething, living fire, where the largest active volcano of the world rolls its angry waves or spouts its huge columns of molten lava into the air ; or up and down the frightfully precipitous and slippery tracks that alone lead across the innumerable gulches that pierce the mountains on the windward and picturesque side of these islands, and that afford the only communications between the villages, and the only means of becoming really acquainted with the marvellous scenery of the group. So much startled were we with Miss Bird's account, on the one hand, of the loveliness of this Paradise, and on the other, of the fearfulness of the dizzy gulches, the hideous craters, the awful and terrible volcano in its comparatively quiescent, infinitely more awful and more terrible in its actively eruptive state, that we rejoiced in being able to verify her statements from Mr. Manley Hopkins's history of thirteen years ago, and from two independent modern sources from which we happened to be able to draw. And though in one or two very minor matters Miss Bird does not seem to be absolutely correct, it is rather that the descriptions are a little scanty than that the facts are otherwise. She tells us, for instance, that there are "no sickly season and no diseases of locality." This is true, but requires to be supplemented by the painful reminder that leprosy is there, and that it is at present only known as a contagious and incurable horror. Indeed, the chapter on the Leper settlement is the only drawback to the book, and we could wish that it had been made an appendix note, that, where it could do no good, it might the more easily escape notice. One other hint we may be allowed to give Miss Bird for a second edition ; that she should give a copious index at the end of the volume, in order that it might be easier to refer for information on the physical geography, botany, scenery, climate, history, inhabitants, costume, customs, missions, &c., of this wonderfully little- known archipelago. The windward shores of these islands, which Cook discovered and christened "0-why-lice,"— he would have hit the mark more nearly by "How-are-ye "—are the most exquisitely beautiful we have ever read of, and their climate the most perfect and yet the reverse of enervating. They seem to combine something of the apparently incongruous characteristics of majestic, stupendous Norwegian fjords, with the luxurious clearness and colouring and softness of the shores of the Mediterranean, and with the extravagant and prodigal wealth of flower and foliage of the forests of South or Central America. The "gulches" are deep ravines with almost precipitous sides, filled with tropical trees and plants, watered by the streams that tumble over the precipices, and shut in by the blue Pacific that sends its tide far up into these silent ravines :—

"Creation surely cannot exhibit a more brilliant green than that which clothes windward Hawaii with perpetual spring. I have never seen such verdure. In the final twenty-nine miles there are more than sixty gulches, from 100 to 700 feet in depth, each with its cataracts,

and wild vagaries of tropical luxuriance This is the paradise of Hawaii. What Honolulu attempts to be, Hilo is without effort."

What, then, =at Hilo be ?—for this is Honolulu :— " And beyond the reef and beyond the blue, nestling among cocoa-nut trees and bananas, umbrella-trees and bread-fruits, oranges, mangoes, hibiscus, algaroba, and passion-flowers, almost hidden in the deep, dense greenery, was Honolulu. Bright blossom of a summer sea! Fair • The Hawaiian Archipelago. By Isabella L. Bird. 1vo]. London: John Murray.

Paradise of the Pacific Each house has a large garden or

yard,' with lawns of bright perennial greens and banks of blazing, many-tinted flowers, and lines of Dracama. and other foliage plants, with their great purple or crimson leaves, and clumps of marvellous lilies, gladiolas, ginger, and many plants unknown to me. Fences and walls are altogether buried by passion-flowers, the night-blowing Cereus, and the tropwolum, mixed with geraniums, fuschia, and jessa- mine which cluster and entangle over them in indescribable profusion-. A soft air mores through the upper branches, and the drip of water from miniature fountains falls musically on the perfumed air. This is midwinter! The summer, they say, is thermometrically hotter, but practically cooler, because of the regular trades which set in in April, but now, with the shaded thermometer at 80° and the sky without clouds, the heat is not oppressive."

If we were to begin to quote the many beautiful passages that describe the woods and trees and gardens and plants, we should be utterly lost in our attempt to select. Even the beautiful description of the coco-pahn—that lonely and lovely tree, that reaches to- wards the heavens, and seems more to belong to them than to earth—shall not tempt us to enter on the domain of tropical vegeta- tion. One more extract, that makes us long to realise our ideal of the dreamy Pacific, and we must turn from the soft and bewitching to the grand and terrible features of the islands :—

"We crossed the Equator in long. 159° 44', but in consequence of the misty weather, it was not till we reached lat. 10° 6' N. that the Pole star, cold and pure, glistened far above the horizon, and two hours later we saw the coruscating Pleiades, and the starry belt of Orion, the blessed familiar constellations of auld lang sync, and a 'breath of the cool north,' the first I have felt for five months, fanned the tropic night and the calm silvery Pacific. From that time we have been in- different to our crawling pace. except for the sick man's sake. The days dawn in rose-colour and die in gold, and through their long hours a sea of delicious blue shimmers beneath the sun, so soft, so blue, so. dreamlike, an ocean worthy of its name, the enchanted region of per- petual calm, and an endless summer. Far off, for many an azure league, rims of rock, fringed with the graceful coco-palm, girdle still lagoons, and are themselves encircled by coral reefs on which the ocean breaks all the year in broad drifts of foam. Myriads of flying-fish and a few dolphins and Portuguese men-of-war flash or float through the scarcely undulating water. But we look in vain for the 'sails of silk and ropes of sandal,' which are alone appropriate to this dream-world. The Pacific in this region is an indolent blue expanse, pure and lonely, an almost untraversed sea. We revel in these tropic days of transcen- dent glory, in the balmy breath which just stirs the dreamy blue, in the brief, fierce, crimson sunsets, in the soft splendour of the nights, when the moon and stars hang like lamps out of a lofty and distant vault, and in the pearly crystalline dawns, when the sun, rising through a veil of rose and gold, 'rejoices as a giant to run his course, and brightens by 'pale gradations' into the 'perfect day."

Were we to quote all the passages which we have marked, either for the beauty or the grandeur of that which they describe, we should have to publish a supplement to our paper; and our work of self-denial begins at the very opening of the volume, where first the summer heat of New Zealand, and afterwards a magnifi- cent storm in the Pacific are drawn for ui with the feeling, and the eye, and the hand of an artist ; and of an artist, too, who becomes, a heroine to us in her unconscious acceptance and brave en- durance of great danger. Ten thousand feet climbed Miss Bird, "suffering excruciating cold," in the island of Maui, to examine

the most stupendous crater in the world, for these islands contain,. not unnaturally, both the largest extinct and the largest active volcano :—

" The great surprise of Haleakala to sue was, that when according to calculation there should have been a summit, an abyss of vast dimen- sions opened below. The mountain-top has been in fact blown off, and one is totally powerless to imagine what the forces must have been which rant it asunder. The crater was clear of fog and clouds, and lighted in every part by the risen sun. The whole, with its contents, can be seen at a single glance, though its girdling precipices are nine- teen miles in extent. Its huge, irregular floor is '2,000 feet below ; New York might be hidden away within it, with abundant room to spare ; and more than one of the numerous subsidiary cones which uplift themselves solitary or in clusters through the arca attain the height of Arthur's Seat at Edinburgh. On the north and cast are the Koolau and Kaupo Gaps, as deep as the crater, through which oceans of lava found their way to the sea. It looks as if the volcanic forces, content with rending the mountain-top in twain, had then passed into an endless repose."

But the crater was not all that Miss Bird saw at that immense height :—

" Before noon clouds surrounded the whole mountain, not in tho vague, flocculent, meaningless masses one usually sees, but in Arctic oceans, where lofty icebergs, floes and pack, lay piled on each other, glistening with the frost of a Polar winter ; then alps on alps, and peaks of well-remembered ranges gleaming above glaciers, and the semblance of forests in deep ravines loaded with new-fallen snow. Snow-drifts, avalanches, oceans held in bondage of eternal ice, and all this massed together, shifting, breaking, glistering, filling up the broad channel which divides Maui from Hawaii, and far away above the lonely masses, rose, in turquoise-blue, like distant islands, the lofty Hawaiian domes of Manna Kea and Mauna Loa, with snow on Mauna Kea yet more dazzling than the clouds. There never was a stranger contrast than between the hideous desolation of the crater below, and those blue and jewelled summits rising above the shifting clouds But gradually the clouds massed themselves, the familiar earth disappeared, and we "I think we all screamed, I know we all wept, but we were speech- less, for a new glory and terror had been added to the earth. It is the most unutterable of wonderful things. The words of common speech are quite useless. It is unimaginable, indescribable, a sight to remem- ber for ever, a sight which at once took possession of every faculty of sense and soul, removing one altogether out of the range of ordinary life The prominent object was fire in motion, but the surface of the double lake was continually skinning over for a second or two with a cooled crust of a lustrous grey-white, like frosted silver, broken by jagged cracks of a bright rose-colour. The movement was nearly always from the sides to the centre, but the movement of the centre itself appeared independent and always took a southerly direction. Before each outburst of agitation there was much hissing and a throb- bing internal roaring, as of imprisoned gases. Now it seemed furious, demoniacal, as if no power on earth could bind it, then playful and sportive, then for a second languid, but only because it was accumu- lating fresh force. On our arrival eleven fire fountains were playing joyously round the lakes, and sometimes the six of the nearer lake ran together in the centre to go wallowing down in one vortex, from which they reappeared bulging upwards, till they formed a huge cone thirty feet high, which plunged downwards in a whirlpool only to reappear in exactly the previous number of fountains in different parts of the lake, high leaping, raging, flinging themselves upwards. Sometimes the whole lake, abandoning its usual centripetal motion, as if impelled southwards, took the form of mighty waves, and surging heavily against the partial barrier with a sound like the Pacific surf, lashed, tore, covered it, and threw itself over it in clots of living fire. It was all confusion' commotion, force, terror, glory, majesty, mystery, and even beauty. And the colour ! 'Eye bath not seen' it ! Molten metal has not that crimson gleam, nor blood that living light! Had I not seen this, I should never have known that such a colour was possible."

But we are exceeding our limits, and we must pass unnoticed numberless interesting topics ; the Royal progress of the pro- mising new young king, Lunalilo, since dead ; political, social, religious questions; mission-work, temples, idolatry; adventure- -especially the crossing of two rivers, during the account of which we suspend our breath, but which, sad to say, is too long for quotation—scenery, natives, costume, occupation—notably riding and surf-bathing—all must be left to the imaginations of those who are so foolish or so unfortunate as not to read this delightful book, whose only fault is that being a reprint of letters home, it naturally somewhat repeats itself, as some slight variety in scene or circumstance revives afresh an enthusiasm that had been partially forgotten, and that its descriptions sometimes lose force by being rather too flowery. We cannot conclude, however, -without a glimpse at the deep "gulches" "which are the distracting beauties of this coast," and of which in one part Miss Bird crossed sixty-nine in thirty miles, and at the steep " palis " or zigzag tracks up their precipitous sides :— " I do not care for any waterfall but Niagara, nor do I care in itself for this one, for though its first leap is 200 feet and its second 1,600, it is so frittered away and dissipated in spray, owing to the very magni- tude of its descent, that there is no volume of water within sight to -create mass or sound. But no words can paint the majesty of the sur- roundings, the cavernous, precipitous walls of rock coming down in one black plunge from the blue sky above to the dark abyss of water below, the sullen shuddering sound with which pieces of rock came hurtling down among the trees, the thin tinkle of the water as it falls, the full rash of the river, the feathery growth of ferns, gigantic below, but so diminished by the height above, as only to show their presence by the green tinge upon the rocks, while in addition to the gloom produced by the stupendous height of the cliffs, there is a cool, green darkness of dense forest, and mighty trees of strange tropical forms glass themselves in the black mirror of the basin. For one moment a ray of sunshine turned the upper part of the spray into a rainbow, and never to my eyes, yore pinnacled in mid. heaven 'in unutterable isolation, blank forgotten unite, in a white, wonderful, illuminated world, without permanence or solidity. Our voices sounded thin in the upper air. The keen' incisive wind that swept the summit, had no kinship with the soft breezes which were rustling the tasselled cane in the green fields of earth which had lately gleamed through the drift. It was a new world and without sympathy, a solitude which could be felt."

But we must pass on to greater wonders still, and glance at the still restless fires of Kilauea on Hawaii itself, where the lake of fire occupies the centre of a crater nine miles in circumference, and 6,000 feet above the sea. To see this also our indomitable authoress undertook a most painful and fatiguing horse-back journey ; but she was rewarded. She had heard, from eye- witnesses grand and awful accounts, which she gives us, of various outbreaks of the volcano, —of one week in which 100 lives and 200 houses had been destroyed, in which "a river of fire from 200 to 800 feet wide and twenty feet deep, with a speed varying from ten to twenty-five miles an hour," went "surging and roaring throughout its length like a cataract, with a power and fury per- fectly indescribable," to the sea. "Once they traced a river of lava burrowing its way 1,500 feet below the surface, and saw it emerge, break over a precipice, and fall hissing into the ocean. Once from their highest mountain a pillar of fire 200 feet in diameter lifted itself for three weeks 1,000 feet into the air, making night day for a hundred miles round, and leaving as its monument a cone a mile in circumference." But we will see what Miss Bird herself saw when she arrived at the brink of the burning lake :—

had the bow of promise looked so heavenly as when it spanned the black, solemn, tree-shadowed abyss, whose deep, still waters only catch

a sunbeam on five days of the year We were away by ten, and galloped across the valley till we came to the nearly perpendicular pali on the other side. The sight of this air-hung trail from Halemanu's house has turned back several travellers who were bent on the trip, but I had been told that it was quite safe on a Waimanu horse ; and keep- ing under my fears as best I could, I let -Hananui precede me, and began the ascent, which is visible from here for an hour. The pall is as nearly perpendicular as can be. Not a bush or fern, hardly a tuft of any green thing, clothes its bare, scathed sides. It terminates pre- cipitously on the sea at a height of 2,000 feet. Up this shelving wall, something like a sheep-track, from thirty to forty-six inches broad, goes, in great, swinging zigzags, sometimes as broken steps of rock breast- high, at others as a smooth ledge with hardly foothold, in three places carried away by heavy rains,—altogether the most frightful track that imagination can conceive. It was most unpleasant to see the guide's horse straining and scrambling, looking every now and then as if about to fall over backwards. My horse went up wisely and nobly, but slip- ping, jumping, scrambling, and sending stones over the ledge, now and then hanging for a second by his fore-feet."