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Again, Theocritus will sketch the bare beginnings of the hillside, as in the third idyl, just where the olive-gardens cease, and where the short grass of the heights alternates with rocks, and thorns, and aromatic plants. None of his pictures seem complete without the presence of water. It may be but the wells that the maidenhair fringes, or the babbling runnel of the fountain of the Nereids.
The air swoons with the scent of lemon-groves; tall palm-trees wave their graceful branches by the shore; music of the softest and the loudest swells from the palace; cool corridors and sunny seats stand ready for the noontide heat or evening calm; without, are olive-gardens, green and fresh and full of flowers.
Most of the hills through which they strike, after starting from Ajaccio, are clothed with a thick brushwood of box, ilex, lentisk, arbutus, and laurustinus, which stretches down irregularly into vineyards, olive-gardens, and meadows.
Pale rose even the olive-gardens; rose the rich brown fallows, the emerging farms; while drawn across the Campagna from north to south, as though some mighty brush had just laid it there for sheer lust of colour, sheer joy in the mating it with the rose, one long strip of sharpest, purest green. Mrs. Burgoyne turned at last from the great spectacle to her companion.
'There is the palazzo and the village. In front of them, indeed, rose an old villa of the Renaissance, with its long flat roofs, its fine loggia, and terraced vineyards. A rude village of grey stone, part, it seemed, of the tufa rocks from which it sprang, pressed round the villa, invaded its olive-gardens, crept up to its very walls. Meanwhile the earth grew kinder and more fertile.
Here I wandered through the olive-gardens alone, and gave way to the rapturous sense of simply being in the land of art and romance, the land of love and song; for there was no ecstatic person with me armed with Murray and prepared to admire anything recommended therein. I was free as a bird.
There were few days, however, even in that exceptional winter, which rendered a fire necessary. The scaldino for the feet was generally sufficient, and this, replenished three times a day, was included in the rent. One of my windows looked out on olive-gardens and on the old church San Miniato, on the hill of the same name. Mr.
And can one ever forget the sunrise over the Gulf of Salerno from the Ravello windows? It was December when we were there; yet nothing spoke of winter. From the inn, perched on a rocky point above the coast, one looked straight down for hundreds of feet, through lemon-groves and olive-gardens, to the blue water.
Indeed as Lucy Foster leant over the balcony, the olive-gardens and vineyards faded before her. She saw in their stead, the snow-covered farms and fields of a New England valley the elms in along village street, bare and wintry a rambling wooden house a glowing fire, in a simple parlour an old man sitting beside it. It is chilly' said Mrs. Burgoyne 'Let us go in. But we will keep the window open.
Under the walls drowse the usual gregarious Lazaruses; others, temporarily resuscitated, trail their grave-clothes after a line of camels and donkeys toward the olive-gardens outside the town.
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