he saw the young palm tree growing at
Apollo's shrine at Delos.[91] But I think the taste for trim hedges
and upright trunks has its usual influence over him here also, and
that he merely means to tell the princess that she is delightfully
tall and straight.

The princess is, however, pleased by his address, and tells him to
wait outside the town, till she can speak to her father about him. The
spot to which she directs him is another ideal piece of landscape,
composed of a "beautiful grove of aspen poplars, a fountain, and a
meadow,"[92] near the road-side: in fact, as nearly as possible such a
scene as meets the eye of the traveller every instant on the
much-despised lines of road through lowland France; for instance, on
the railway between Arras and Amiens;--scenes, to my mind, quite
exquisite in the various grouping and grace of their innumerable
poplar avenues, casting sweet, tremulous shadows over their level
meadows and labyrinthine streams. We know that the princess means
aspen poplars, because soon afterwards we find her fifty maid-servants
at the palace, all spinning and in perpetual motion, compared to the
"leaves of the tall poplar"; and it is with exquisite feeling that it
is made afterwards[93] the chief tree in the groves of Proserpine; its
light and quivering leafage having exactly the melancholy expression
of fragility, faintness, and inconstancy which the ancients attributed
to the disembodied spirit.[94] The likeness to the poplars by the
streams of Amiens is more marked still in the _Iliad_, where the young
Simois, struck by Ajax, falls to the earth "like an aspen that has
grown in an irrigated meadow, smooth-trunked, the soft shoots
springing from its top, which some coach-making man has cut down with
his keen iron, that he may fit a wheel of it to a fair chariot, and it
lies parching by the side of the stream."[95] It is sufficiently
notable that Homer, living in mountainous and rocky countries, dwells
thus delightedly on all the _flat_ bits; and so I think invariably the
inhabitants of mountain countries do, but the inhabitants of the
plains do not, in any similar way, dwell delightedly on mountains. The
Dutch painters are perfectly contented with their flat fields and
pollards;[96] Rubens, though he had seen the Alps, usually composes
his landscapes of a hayfield or two, plenty of pollards and willows, a
distant spire, a Dutch house with a moat about it, a windmill, and a
ditch. The Flemish sac