And in its clear, silent waters,
a few days, in the culmination of the heat, bring forth translucent
living creatures, many-shaped jelly-fish, coloured like mother-of-pearl.
But without going so far from the landscape of daily life, it is in
agricultural Italy that the _little less_ makes so undesignedly, and as
it were so inevitably, for beauty. The country that is formed for use
and purpose only is immeasurably the loveliest. What a lesson in
literature! How feelingly it persuades us that all except a very little
of the ornament of letters and of life makes the dulness of the world.
The tenderness of colour, the beauty of series and perspective, and the
variety of surface, produced by the small culture of vegetables, are
among the charms that come unsought, and that are not to be found by
seeking--are never to be achieved if they are sought for their own sake.
And another of the delights of the useful laborious land is its vitality.
The soil may be thin and dry, but man's life is added to its own. He has
embanked the hill to make little platforms for the growth of wheat in the
light shadows of olive leaves. Thanks to the metayer land-tenure, man's
heart, as well as his strength, is given to the ground, with his hope and
his honour.
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