beneath the pure light of Phoebus, their ancestral god. Pallas protected
them, and golden Aphrodite favored them with beauty. Olives are not,
however, by any means the only trees which play a part in idyllic scenery.
The tall stone pine is even more important.... Near Massa, by Sorrento,
there are two gigantic pines so placed that, lying on the grass beneath
them, one looks on Capri rising from the sea, Baiae, and all the bay of
Naples sweeping round to the base of Vesuvius. Tangled growths of olives,
and rose-trees fill the garden-ground along the shore, while far away in
the distance pale Inarime sleeps, with her exquisite Greek name, a virgin
island on the deep.

"On the wilder hills you find patches of ilex and arbutus glowing with
crimson berries and white waxen bells, sweet myrtle rods and shafts of
bay, frail tamarisk and tall tree-heaths that wave their frosted boughs
above your head. Nearer the shore the lentisk grows, a savory shrub, with
cytisus and aromatic rosemary. Clematis and polished garlands of tough
sarsaparilla wed the shrubs with clinging, climbing arms; and here and
there in sheltered nooks the vine shoots forth luxuriant tendrils bowed
with grapes, stretching from branch to branch of mulberry or elm, flinging
festoons on which young loves might sit and swing, or weaving a
lattice-work of leaves across the open shed. Nor must the sounds of this
landscape be forgotten,--sounds of bleating flocks, and murmuring bees,
and nightingales, and doves that moan, and running streams, and shrill
cicadas, and hoarse frogs, and whispering pines. There is not a single
detail which a patient student may not verify from Theocritus.

"Then too it is a landscape in which sea and country are never sundered.
The higher we climb upon the mountain-side the more marvellous is the
beauty of the sea, which seems to rise as we ascend, and stretch into the
sky. Sometimes a little flake of blue is framed by olive boughs, sometimes