314 
EVERGREENS OF SOUTHERN EUROFE. 
to tlie tempest, bends to the wind with an elasticity 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 the date palm is 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 explain 
the beauty of the winter scenery of Italy. Indeed it is only in 
the winter that a tourist who confines himself to wheel car¬ 
riages and high roads can acquire any notion of the face of the 
earth, and form any proper geographical image of that coun¬ 
try. At other seasons, not high walls only, but equally imper¬ 
vious 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 gratification of his 
curiosity.* 
* Besides this, in a country so diversified in surface—I wish we could 
with the French say accidented —as Italy with the exception of the 
champaign region drained by the Po, every new field of view requires 
either an extraordinary coup d'c&il in the spectator, or a long study, in 
order to master its relief, its plans, its salient and retreating angles. In 
summer, 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 annihi¬ 
lation of all standards for the measurement of space, yet the superior 
intelligibility of the winter scenery of Italy is more profitable to those 
who see with a view to analyze. 
