eBooks Base 2000

And having wasted
thus much of description on the landscape, I will finish with saying that
it lacked only water to be a very fine one. It is strange what a
difference the gleam of water makes, and how a scene awakens and comes to
life wherever it is visible. The landscape, moreover, gives the beholder
(at least, this beholder) a sense of oppressive sunshine and scanty
shade, and does not incite a longing to wander through it on foot, as a
really delightful landscape should. The vine, too, being cultivated in
so trim a manner, does not suggest that idea of luxuriant fertility,
which is the poetical notion of a vineyard. The olive-orchards have a
pale and unlovely hue. An English view would have been incomparably
richer in its never-fading green; and in my own country, the wooded hills
would have been more delightful than these peaks and ridges of dreary and
barren sunshine; and there would have been the bright eyes of half a
dozen little lakes, looking heavenward, within an extent like that of the
Val d' Arno.


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