NEWS OF SPRING 



stand, with its everlasting town music, around which gather 

 the consumptive rank and fashion of Mentone; and behold, 

 at two steps from the crowd that dreads it as it would a scourge 

 from Heaven, you find the admirable silence of the trees, with 

 all the goodly Virgilian realities of sunk roads, clear springs, 

 shady pools that sleep on the mountain-slopes, where they 

 seem waiting to reflect a goddess. You climb a path between 

 two walls of stone brightened by violets and crowned with 

 the strange brown cowls of the arisarum, which has leaves of 

 so deep a green that one might believe them to be created 

 to symbolize the coolness of the wells ; and the amphitheatre 

 of a valley opens like a moist and splendid flower. Through 

 the blue veil of the giant olive-trees, which cover the horizon 

 with a transparent curtain of shimmering pearls, shines the 

 discreet and harmonious glamour of all that men imagine in 

 their dreams and paint upon scenes that are thought unreal 

 and unrealizable, when they wish to define the ideal gladness 

 of an immortal hour, of some enchanted island, of a lost para- 

 dise or the abode of the gods. 



3 



All along the valleys of this coast are hundreds of those 



[133] 



