, to build the ugly
fortifications of the then new fashion, now antiquated and useless.
Take one glance, and walk on, to look at live Nature--far more
interesting than dead Art.
Everything fattens in the close damp air of the canal. The great
flat, with its heavy crops, puts you in mind of the richest English
lowland--save for the total want of old meadows. The weeds on the
bank are English in type, only larger and richer--as becomes the
climate. But as you look among them, you see forms utterly new and
strange, whose kinship you cannot fancy, but which remind you that
you are nearing Italy, and Greece, and Africa. And in the hedges are
great bay-trees; and inside them, orchards of standard fig and white
mulberry, with its long yearling shoots of glorious green--soon to be
stripped bare for the silkworms; and here and there long lines of
cypresses, black against the bright green plain and bright blue sky.
No; you are not in Britain. Certainly not; for there is a drake (not
a duck) quacking with feeble treble in that cypress, six feet over
your head; and in Britain drakes do not live in trees.
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