EVERGKEElSrS OF SOUTHERN EUROPE. 333 



The cypress and tlie iimbrella-piiie are not merely conventional 

 types of the Italian landscape. They are essential elements in a 

 field of rural beauty which can be seen in perfection 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 tlie 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 indi- 

 vidual 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 

 aud the lemon, the cork oak, the ilex, the myrtle, and the laurel, 

 are evergreens — goes far to explain 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 the earth, and form any proper 

 geographical image of that country. At other seasons, not high 

 walls only, but equally impervious hedges, and now, unhappily, 

 acacias thickly planted along the railway routes, confine the view 

 so completely, that the arch of a tunnel, or a night-cap over the 

 traveller's eyes, is scarcely a more effectual obstacle to the grati- 

 fication of his curiosity.f 



* European poets, whose knowledge of the date-palm is not founded on 

 personal observation, often describe its trunk as not only slender, but particu- 

 larly straight. Nothing can be farther from the truth. When the Orientals 

 compare the form of a beautiful girl to the stem of the palm, they do not 

 represent it as rigidly straight, but on the contrary as made up of graceful 

 curves, which seem less like permanent outlines than like flowing motion. In 

 a 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 

 diverging from, now crossing, each other, and among a hundred you will 

 hardly see two whose axes are parallel. 



f Besides this, in a country so diversified in surface as Italy, with the ex- 

 ception of the champaign region drained by the Po, every new field of view 

 requires either an extraordinary coup d'ceil in the spectator, or a long study, in 

 order to master its relief, its plans, its salient and retreating angles. In sum- 

 mer, except of course in the bare mountains, the universal greenery confounds 

 light and shade, distance and foreground ; and though the impression upon a 

 traveller, who journeys for the sake of " sensations," may be strengthened by 

 the mysterious annihilation of all standards for the measurement of space, 

 yet the superior intelligibility of the winter scenery of Italy is more profitabl« 

 to those who see with a view to analyze. 



