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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
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* 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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