3"^ 2 Professor Hoffmann on the Scenery of Italy. 



of Arcadian poetry, — pathless and gloomy woods, impenetrable 

 copses, and refreshing shades." For a thinly scattered forest of 

 oaks, neither remarkable for their size nor their magnificent 

 forms, and a turf full of ferns, and entirely destitute of brush- 

 wood, which furnishes but a scanty subsistence for a few sheep, 

 will hardly serve to redeem the accuracy of this picture. He 

 will, on the contrary, be much more disposed to subscribe to the 

 sentiments of our unprejudiced countryman M. V. Riedesel, who 

 writes to Winckelman in 1767, that he was totally disappointed 

 on seeing the woods of Etna, all the fine descriptions of which 

 were utter falsehoods. All the trees are dwarfs compared with 

 those to which we have been accustomed, and if we are disap- 

 pointed by the almost total want of grass, our agreeable sensa- 

 tions are not increased by the deficiency of water, which re- 

 minds us at every step that we are treading the porous vault of 

 a volcano. For not a single spring has yet been detected 

 throughout the whole compass of Etna, fit for giving a stand- 

 ard temperature ; and water-bottles always occupied a promi- 

 nent place among the baggage of oar mules on our tours 

 through the mountain, which were carefully filled, whenever we 

 came upon a patch of snow, or on a pool of water, in the fissures 

 of the rocks ; and without this entirely novel appendage to a 

 European traveller's equipment, our progress would have been 

 much impeded. Yet, notwithstanding all these minor faults, who 

 is there whose recollections of this beautiful country will not be 

 agreeably revived by many imperishable reminiscences ? Who- 

 ever has once inhaled the balmy air, or cast his eyes upon the 

 azure sky, so characterized by its eternal serenity in this climate, 

 or has beheld its magic splendour, which communicates to a 

 poor landscape a heavenly beauty, who is not sometimes seized 

 with a chilling sensation when he recalls to his imagination our 

 dull and stormy northern sky ? and we can only place our be- 

 loved homes in competition with this foreign land, when we 

 think of our most beautiful scenes, and the delightful changes 

 of the seasons, which bring along with them their varied and in- 

 teresting enjoyments. The simplicity in the mode of life, and 

 the facility of subsistence, has no doubt something attractive to 

 the northerns, and we could hardly suppose that the superflui- 

 ties so abundantly lavished on this land by the bountiful hand 



