tions
more on things of earth, fancy that because these monks despised the
world, and did not write about its landscapes, therefore they were
dead to its beauty. This is mere vanity: the mountains, stars, seas,
fields, and living things were only swallowed up in the one thought of
God, and made subordinate to the awfulness of human destinies. We
to whom hills are hills, and seas are seas, and stars are ponderable
quantities, speak, write, and reason of them as of objects interesting
in themselves. The monks were less ostensibly concerned about such
things, because they only found in them the vestibules and symbols of
a hidden mystery.

The contrast between the Greek and mediaeval modes of regarding
Nature is not a little remarkable. Both Greeks and monks, judged by
nineteenth-century standards, were unobservant of natural beauties.
They make but brief and general remarks upon landscapes and the like.
The [Greek: pontion te kumaton anerithmon gelasma] is very
rare. But the Greeks stopped at the threshold of Nature; the forces
they found there, the gods, were inherent in Nature, and distinct.
They did not, like the monks, place one spiritual power, omnipotent
and omnipresent, above all, and see in Nature lessons of Divine
government. We ourselves having somewhat overstrained the latter point
of view, are now apt to return vaguely to Greek fancies. Perhaps, too,
we talk so much about scenery because it is scenery to us, and the
life has gone out of it.

I cannot leave the Cornice without one word about a place which lies
between Mentone and San Remo. Bordighera has a beauty which is quite
distinct from both. Palms are its chief characteristics. They lean
against the garden walls, and feather the wells outside the town,
where women come with brazen pitchers to draw water. In some of the
marshy tangles of the plain, they spring from a thick undergrowth of
spiky leaves, and rear their tall aerial arms against the deep blue
background of the sea or darker purple of the distant hills. White
pigeons fly about among their branches, and the air is loud with
cooings and with rustlings, and the hoarser croaking of innumerable
frogs. Then, in the olive-groves that stretch along the level shore,
are labyrinths of rare and curious plants, painted tulips and white
periwinkles, flinging their light of blossoms and dark glossy leaves
down the swift channels of the brawling streams. On each side of the
rivulets they grow, like sister ca