Excerpt from Sketches in Italy
We do not often scale these altitudes, but keep along the terraced glades by the side of olive-shaded streams. The violets, instead of peeping shyly from hedgerows, fall in ripples and cascades over mossy walls among maidenhair and spleen worts. They are very sweet, and the sound of trickling water seems to mingle with their fragrance in a most delicious har mony. Sound, smell, and hue make up one chord, the sense of which is pure. And perfect peace. The country-people are kind, letting us pass everywhere, so that we make our way along their aqueducts and through their gardens, under laden lemon-boughs, the pale fruit dangling at our ears, and swinging showers of scented dew upon us as we pass. Far better, however, than lemon or orange-trees, are the olives. Some of these are immensely old, numbering, it is said, five centuries, so that Petrarch may almost have rested beneath their shade on his way to Avignon. These veterans are cavernous with age: gnarled, split, and twisted trunks, throwing out arms that break into a hundred branches; every branch distinct, and feathered with innumerable sparks and spikelets of white, wavy, greenish light. These are the leaves, and the stems are gray with lichens. 'the sky and sea - two blues, one full of sunlight and the other purple - set these fountains of peren nial brightness like gems in lapis-lazuli. At a distance the.
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