h the most graceful effect, some standing up to the mid-leg in the
stream, others spreading the linen on the sunny bank, some, flinging
back their long hair, stood shading their brows with their hands and
gazing on us as we passed: it was a _scene_ for a poet, or a painter,
or a melo-drama. An English garden, adorned at every turn with statues
of the heathen deities (although they were all but personifications of
the various attributes of nature,) would be ridiculous. Setting aside
the injury they must sustain from our damp, variable climate, they
would be _out of keeping_ with all around; here it is altogether
different; the very air of Italy is embued with the spirit of ancient
mythology; and though "the fair humanities of old religion," the
Nymphs, the Fauns, the Dryads be banished from their haunts and live
no longer in the faith of reason, yet still, whithersoever we turn,
some statue, some temple in ruins, some fragment of an altar, some
inscription half effaced, some name half-barbarized, recalls to the
fancy those forms of light, of beauty, of majesty, which poetry
created to people scenes for which mere humanity was not in itself
half pure enough, fair enough, bright enough.

What can be more grand than a noble forest of English oak? or more
beautiful than a grove of beeches and elms, clothed in their rich
autumnal tints? or more delicious than the apple orchard in full
bloom? but it is true, notwithstanding, that the olive, and cypress,
and cedar, the orange and the citron, the fig and the pomegranate, the
myrtle and the vine, convey a different and more luxuriant feeling to
the mind; and are associated with ideas which give to the landscape
they adorn a character more delightfully, more _poetically_
picturesque.

When at Lord Grosvenor's or Lord Stafford's I have been seated
opposite to some beautiful Italian landscape, a Claude or a Poussin,
with a hill crowned with olives, a ruined temple, a group of peasants
seated on a fallen column, or dancing to the pipe and the guitar, and
over all the crimson glow of evening, or the violet tints of morning,
I have exclaimed with others, "How lovely! how picturesque, how very
poetical!" No one thought of saying "How _natural_!" because it is a
style of nature with which we are totally unacquainted; and if some
amateurs of real taste and feeling prefer a rural cattle scene of Paul
Potter or Cuyp, to all the grand or lovely creations of Salvator, or
Claude, or Poussin,