25. Every part of the landscape is in unison; the same glory of mourning
is thrown over the whole; the deep blue of the heavens is mingled with
that of the everlasting hills, or melted away into the silence of the
sapphire sea; the pale cities, temple and tower, lie gleaming along the
champaign; but how calmly! no hum of men; no motion of multitude in the
midst of them: they are voiceless as the city of ashes. The transparent
air is gentle among the blossoms of the orange and the dim leaves of the
olive; and the small fountains, which, in any other land, would spring
merrily along, sparkling and singing among tinkling pebbles, here flow
calmly and silently into some pale font of marble, all beautiful with
life; worked by some unknown hand, long ago nerveless, and fall and
pass on among wan flowers, and scented copse, through cool leaf-lighted
caves or gray Egerian grottoes, to join the Tiber or Eridanus, to swell
the waves of Nemi, or the Larian Lake. The most minute objects (leaf,
flower, and stone), while they add to the beauty, seem to share in the
sadness, of the whole.
26. But, if one principal character of Italian landscape is melancholy,
another is elevation. We have no simple rusticity of scene, no cowslip
and buttercup humility of seclusion. Tall mulberry trees, with festoons
of the luxuriant vine, purple with ponderous clusters, trailed and
trellised between and over them, shade the wide fields of stately Indian
corn; luxuriance of lofty vegetation (catalpa, and aloe, and olive),
ranging itself in lines of massy light along the wan champaign, guides
the eye away to the unfailing wall of mountain, Alp or Apennine; no cold
long range of shivery gray, but dazzling light of snow, or undulating
breadth of blue, fainter and darker, in infinite variety; peak,
precipice, and promontory passing away into the wooded hills, each with
its tower or white village sloping into the plain; castellated
battlements cresting their undulations; some wide majestic river gliding
along the champaign, the bridge on its breast, and the city on its
shore; the whole canopied with cloudless azure, basking in mistless
sunshine, breathing the silence of odoriferous air.
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