THE LEAF. 45 



Colonel Leake's diary in crossing the Msenalian range in spring. 

 And then, lastly, you have the laurel and vine region, full of 

 sweetness and Elysian beauty. 



28. Now as Mercury is the ruling power of the hill en- 

 chantment, so Daphne of the leafy peace. She is, in her 

 first life, the daughter of the mountain river, the mist of it 

 filling the valley ; the Sun, pursuing, and effacing it, from 

 dell to dell, is, literally, Apollo pursuing Daphne, and adverse 

 to her ; (not, as in the earlier tradition, the Sun pursuing 

 only his own light). Daphne, thus hunted, cries to her mother, 

 the Earth, which opens, and receives her, causing the laurel 

 to spring up in her stead. That is to say, wherever the rocks 

 protect the mist from the sunbeam, and suffer it to water the 

 earth, there the laurel and other richest vegetation fill the 

 hollows, giving a better glory to the sun itself. For sunshine, 

 on the torrent spray, on the grass of its valley, and entangled 

 among the laurel stems, or glancing from their leaves, be- 

 came a thousandfold lovelier and more sacred than the same 

 sunbeams, burning on the leafless mountain-side. 



And farther, the leaf, in its connection with the river, is 

 typically expressive, not, as the flower was, of human fading 

 and passing away, but of the perpetual flow and renewal of 

 human mind and thought, rising "like the rivers that run 

 among the hills " ; therefore it was that the youth of Greece 



ered with firs. The mountain between the plain of Levidhi and Alo- 

 nistena, or, to speak by the ancient nomenclature, that part of the Mae- 

 nalian range which separates the Orchomenia from the valleys of Helisson 

 and Methydrium, is clothed also with large forests of the same trees ; 

 the road across this ridge from Levidhi to Alonistena is now impractica- 

 ble on account of the snow. 



I am detained all day at Levidhi by a heavy fall of snow, which before 

 the evening has covered the ground to half a foot in depth, although the 

 village is not much elevated above the plain, nor in a more lofty situa- 

 tion than Tripolitza. 



March Wi. Yesterday afternoon and during the night the snow fell 

 in such quantities as to cover all the plains and adjacent mountains; 

 and the country exhibited this morning as fine a snow-scene as Norway 

 could supply. As the day advanced and the sun appeared, the snow 

 melted rapidly, but the sky was soon overcast again, and the enow 

 began to fall. 



