button to main menu  Wordsworth's Guide 1810, edn 1835

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page 104
plants that are more valuable on account of the fruit they produce to gratify the palate, than for affording pleasure to the eye, as materials of landscape. Take, for instance, the Promontory of Bellagio, so fortunate in its command of the three branches of the Lake of Como, yet the ridge of the Promontory itself, being for the most part covered with vines interspersed with olive trees, accords but ill with the vastness of the green unappropriated mountains, and derogates not a little from the sublimity of those finely contrasted pictures to which it is a fore-ground. The vine, when cultivated upon a large scale, notwithstanding all that may be said of it in poetry,* makes but a dull formal appearance in landscape; and the olive-tree (though one is loth to say so) is not more grateful to the eye than our common willow, which it much resembles; but the hoariness of hue, common to both, has in the aquatic plant an appropriate delicacy, harmonising with the situation in which it most delights. The same may no
* Lucretius has charmingly described a scene of this kind.
"Inque dies magis in montem succedere sylvas
Cogebant, infraque locum concedere cultis:
Prata, lacus, rivos, segetes, vinetaque laeta
Collibus et campis ut haberent, atque olearum
Coerula distinguens inter plaga currere posset
Per tumulos, et convalleis, camposque profusa:
Ut nunc esse vides vario distincta lepore
Omnia, quae pomis intersita dulcibus ornant,
Arbustisque tenent felicibus obsita circum."
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