To
one who had learned to know their song in warm pleasant places by
the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the country, and make it
still bleaker by suggested contrast. Even the waste places by the
side of the road were not, as Hawthorne liked to put it, 'taken
back to Nature' by any decent covering of vegetation. Wherever the
land had the chance, it seemed to lie fallow. There is a certain
tawny nudity of the South, bare sunburnt plains, coloured like a
lion, and hills clothed only in the blue transparent air; but this
was of another description--this was the nakedness of the North;
the earth seemed to know that it was naked, and was ashamed and
cold.
It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. Indeed, this had
passed into the speech of the inhabitants, and they saluted each
other when they met with 'Breezy, breezy,' instead of the customary
'Fine day' of farther south. These continual winds were not like
the harvest breeze, that just keeps an equable pressure against
your face as you walk, and serves to set all the trees talking over
your head, or bring round you the smell of the wet surface of the
country after a shower. They were of the bitter, hard, persistent
sort, that interferes with sight and respiration, and makes the
eyes sore. Even such winds as these have their own merit in proper
time and place.
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