nobil persona,_ are the
terms of adoration with which he approaches his mistress. The
elevation of feeling and perfect breeding which Manzoni has so well
delineated in the loves of Renzo and Lucia are traditional among
Italian country-folk. They are conscious that true gentleness is no
matter of birth or fortune:--

E tu non mi lasciar per poverezza,
Che poverta non guasta gentilezza.[28]

This in itself constitutes an important element of culture, and
explains to some extent the high romantic qualities of their
impassioned poetry. The beauty of their land reveals still more. 'O
fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint!' Virgil's exclamation is as true
now as it was when he sang the labours of Italian country-folk some
nineteen centuries ago. To a traveller from the north there is a
pathos even in the contrast between the country in which these
children of a happier climate toil, and those bleak, winter-beaten
fields where our own peasants pass their lives. The cold nights and
warm days of Tuscan springtime are like a Swiss summer. They make rich
pasture and a hardy race of men. Tracts of corn and oats and rye
alternate with patches of flax in full flower, with meadows yellow
with buttercups or pink with ragged robin; the young vines, running
from bough to bough of elm and mulberry, are just coming into leaf.
The poplars are fresh with bright green foliage. On the verge of this
blooming plain stand ancient cities ringed with hills, some rising to
snowy Apennines, some covered with white convents and sparkling with
villas. Cypresses shoot, black and spirelike, amid grey clouds of
olive-boughs upon the slopes; and above, where vegetation borders on
the barren rock, are masses of ilex and arbutus interspersed with
chestnut-trees not yet in leaf. Men and women are everywhere at work,
ploughing with great white oxen, or tilling the soil with spades six
feet in length--Sabellian ligones. The songs of nightingales among
acacia-trees, and the sharp scream of swallows wheeling in air, mingle
with the monotonous chant that always rises from the country-people at
their toil. Here and there on points of vantage, where the hill-slopes
sink into the plain, cluster white villages with flower-like
campanili. It is there that the veglia, or evening rendezvous of
lovers, the serenades and balls and feste, of which one hears so much
in the popular minstrelsy, take place. Of course it would not be
difficult to paint the darker shades