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.
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