are tufts of the pale
starry primroses; coarse spurge, and lush masses of the hellebore with its
large pale green flowers and dark leaves are common enough on all sides.
From amongst the naked trees we emerge into the bare bleak stony stretches
that lead to the summit, covered with the coarse but aromatic vegetation
that clothes the dry limestone wastes of the south. How truly marvellous
is the description of these wind-swept, weed-grown solitudes that Robert
Browning presents to us in what is perhaps the most truly Italian in
feeling of all his poems, "The Englishman in Italy!" For here with the
rich imagination, worthy of some of Shelley's finest flights, is mingled
an accurate appreciation of Nature, of which Wordsworth might well be
proud; for the Lake poet himself could not have improved upon this
exquisite description of the various shrubs and plants of a limestone
hill-top in Italy.

"The wild path grew wilder each instant,
And place was e'en grudged
'Mid the rock-chasms and piles of loose stones,
Like the loose broken teeth
Of some monster which climbed there to die
From the ocean beneath--
Place was grudged to the silver-grey fume-weed
That clung to the path,
And dark rosemary ever a-dying,
That, spite the wind's wrath,
So loves the salt rock's face to seaward,
And lentisks as staunch
To the stone where they root and bear berries,
And ... what shows a branch
Coral-coloured, transparent, with circlets
Of pale sea-green leaves."

Above our heads hovers a kite, performing graceful circles in the keen
clear air and breaking the oppressive silence of the place with his shrill
screams, for his mate must have her nest hidden in some cleft of yon grey
towering cliff. A pair of crested hoopoes with brown plumage and ruddy
breasts keep fluttering a little way before us, uttering from time to time
their curious notes of alarm. Mercifully these handsome birds have escaped
the fowler, who lays his snares even amongst the spirit-haunted crags of
this desolate region. The hoopoe, though a very rare visitor to our
northern shores, is fairly common on the Mediterranean coast, and he would
be still more frequently encountered, were it not for his hereditary
enemy, Man. There is a venerable legend concerning this interesting
bird--_bubbola_, the Italians call him--which relates how ages ago on the
scorching plains of Palestine a number of hoopoes once followed King
Solomon