The Contrast.
What a change from the plains of Latium!-a change as imposing in its larger and more characteristic features, as it is curious in its minutest details; and who that has witnessed the return of six summers calling into life the rank verdure of the Colosseum, can fail to contrast these jocund revels of the advancing year in this gay region of France, with the blazing Italian summers, coming forth with no other herald or attendant than the gloomy green of the "hated cypress," and the unrelieved glare of the interminable Campagna? Bright, indeed, was that Italian heaven, and deep beyond all language was its blue; but the spirit of transitory and changeable creatures is quelled and overmastered by this permanent and immutable scene! It is like the contrast between the dappled sky of cheerful morning, when eye and ear are on the alert to catch any transitory gleam and to welcome each distant echo, and the awful immovable stillness of noon, when Pan is sleeping, and will be wroth if he is awakened, when the whole life of nature is still, and we look down shuddering into its unfathomable depth! Standing on the heights of Tusculum, or on the sacred pavement of the Latian Jupiter, every glance we send forth into the objects around us, returns laden with matter to cherish forebodings and despondencies. The ruins speak of an immovable past, the teeming growths which mantle them, the abundant source of future malaria, of a destructive future, and activity, the only spell by which we can evoke the cheerful spirit of the present—activity within us, or around us, there is none. What wonder if we now feel as though the weight of all those grim ruins had been heaved from off the mind, and left it buoyant and eager to greet the present as though we were but the creatures of it! Whatever denizen of the vegetable or the animal kingdom we were familiar with in Italy and miss hereabouts, is replaced by some more cheerful race. What a variety of trees! and how various their shades of green! Though not equal to thy pines, Pamfili, and to thy fair cypresses, Borghese, whose feet lie cushioned in crocuses and anemones, yet a fine tree is the poplar; and yonder, extending for a couple of miles, is an avenue of their stateliest masts. The leaves of those nearest to us are put into a tremulous movement by a breeze too feeble for our skins to feel it; and as the rustling foliage from above gently purrs as instinct with life from within, this peculiar sound comes back to us like a voice we have heard and forgotten. No "marble wilderness" or olive-darkened upland, no dilapidated "Osterie," famine within doors and fever without, here press desolation into the service of the picturesque. Neither here have we those huge masses of arched brickwork, consolidated with Roman cement, pierced by wild fig-trees, crowned with pink valerians or acanthus, and giving issue to companies of those gloomy funeral-paced insects of the Melasome family, (the Avis, the Pimelia, and the Blaps,) whose dress is deep mourning, and whose favoured haunt is the tomb! But in their place, a richly endowed, thickly inhabited plain, filled with cottages and their gardens, farms and their appurtenances, ponds screaming with dog-defying geese, and barnyards commingling all the mixed noises of their live stock together. Encampments of ants dressed out in uniforms quite unlike those worn by the Formicary legions in Italy; gossamer cradles nursing progenies of our Cisalpine caterpillars, and spiders with new arrangements of their eight pairs of eyes, forming new arrangements of meshes, and hunting new flies, are here. Here too, once again, we behold, not without emotion, (for, small as he is, this creature has conjured up to us former scenes and associations of eight years ago,) that tiny light-blue butterfly, that hovers over our ripening corn, and is not known but as a stranger, in the south; also, that minute diamond beetle[1] who always plays at bo-peep with you from behind the leaves of his favourite hazel, and the burnished corslet and metallic elytra of the pungent unsavoury gold beetle;[2] while we miss the grillus that leaps from hedge to hedge; the thirsty dragon-fly, restless and rustling on his silver wings; the hoarse cicadæ, whose "time-honoured" noise you durst not find fault with, even if you would, and which you come insensibly to like; and that huge long-bodied hornet,[3] that angry and terrible disturber of the peace, borne on wings, as it were, of the wind, and darting through space like a meteor!