3842 EVERGREENS OF SOUTHERN EUROPE, 
majestic, the other the most ungraceful, or—if I may apply 
such an expression to anything but human affectation of 
movement —the most awkward of trees. The poplar trembles 
before the blast, flutters, struggles wildly, dishevels its foliage, 
gropes around with its feeble branches, and hisses as in 
impotent passion. The cypress gathers its limbs still more 
closely to its stem, bows a gracious salute rather than an hum- 
ble obeisance to the tempest, bends to the wind with an elasti- 
city that assures you of its prompt return to its regal attitude, 
and sends from its thick leaflets a murmur like the roar of the 
far-off ocean. 
The cypress and the umbrella-pine are not merely conven- 
tional types of the Italian landscape. They are essential ele- 
ments in a field of rural beauty which can be seen in perfec- 
tion only in the basin of the Mediterranean, and they are as 
characteristic of this class of scenery as is the date-palm of the 
oases of the Eastern desert. There is however, this difference : 
a single cypress or pine is often enough to shed beauty over a 
wide area; the palm is a social tree, and its beauty is not so 
much that of the individual as of the group.* The frequency 
of the cypress and the pine—combined with the fact that the 
other trees of Southern Europe which most interest a stranger 
from the north, the orange and the lemon, the cork oak, the 
ilex, the myrtle, and the laurel, are evergreens—goes far to ex- 
plain the beauty of the winter scenery of Italy. Indeed, it is 
only in the winter that a tourist who confines himself to wheel- 
carriages and high roads can acquire any notion of the face of 
* European poets, whose knowledge of the date-palm is not founded on per- 
sonal observation, often describe its trunk as not only slender, but particularly 
struight. Nothing can be farther from the truth. When the Orientals com- 
pare the form of a beautiful girl to the stem of the palm, they do not repre- 
sent it as rigidly straight, but on the contrary as made up of graceful curves, 
which seem less like permanent outlines than like flowing motion. Ina palm 
grove, the trunks, so far from standing planted upright like the candles of a 
chandelier, bend in a vast variety of curves, now leaning towards, now diverg- 
ing from, now crossing, each other, and among a hundred you will hardly see 
two whose axes are parallel. 
