Now, 'to quail' in Cornwall still carries its old meaning, 'to shrink,' 'to wither.' The farmer dug his potatoes with all speed, and next year the almanack was richer by a score of subscribers.
Zadkiel or no Zadkiel, I will suspire, and risk it, "O that I were lying under the olives!" "O to be out of England now that February's here!"—for indeed this is the time to take the South express and be quit of fogs, and loaf and invite your soul upon the Mediterranean shore before the carnivals and regattas sweep it like a mistral. Nor need you be an invalid to taste those joys on which Stevenson dilates in that famous little essay in "Virginibus Puerisque" (or, as the young American lady preferred to call it, "Virginis Pueribusque."):—
"Or perhaps he may see a group of washer-women relieved, on a spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or a meeting of flower-gatherers in the tempered daylight of an olive-garden; and something significant or monumental in the grouping, something in the harmony of faint colour that is always characteristic of the dress of these Southern women, will come home to him unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction with which we tell ourselves that we are richer by one more beautiful experience.… And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate, and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now grey, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like 'cloud on cloud,' massed in filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with little momentary silverings and shadows."
"Or perhaps he may see a group of washer-women relieved, on a spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or a meeting of flower-gatherers in the tempered daylight of an olive-garden; and something significant or monumental in the grouping, something in the harmony of faint colour that is always characteristic of the dress of these Southern women, will come home to him unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction with which we tell ourselves that we are richer by one more beautiful experience.… And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate, and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now grey, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like 'cloud on cloud,' massed in filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with little momentary silverings and shadows."
English poets, too, have been at their best on the Riviera: from Cette, where Matthew Arnold painted one of the most brilliant little landscapes in our literature, along to Genoa, where Tennyson visited and:
"Loved that hall, tho' white and cold,
Those nichèd shapes of noble mould,
A princely people's awful princes,
The grave, severe Genovese of old."
"Loved that hall, tho' white and cold,
Those nichèd shapes of noble mould,
A princely people's awful princes,
The grave, severe Genovese of old."
[I suppose, by the way, that every one who has taken the trouble to compare the stanza of 'The Daisy' with that of the invitation 'To the Rev. F. D. Maurice,' which immediately follows, will have noted the pretty rhythmical difference made by the introduction of the double dactyl in the closing line of the latter; the difference between:
"Of ólive, áloe, and maíze, and víne,"
"Of ólive, áloe, and maíze, and víne,"