She had figured in her own mind a beautiful breezy town, high set
on a peaked hill, in fresh and mossy country. She had envisaged
the mountains to her soul as clad with shady woods, and strewn with
huge boulders under whose umbrageous shelter bloomed waving masses
of the pretty pale blue Apennine anemones she saw sold in big
bunches at the street corners in Florence. She had imagined, in
short, that Umbria was a wilder Italian Wales, as fresh, as green,
as sweet-scented, as fountain-fed. And she knew pretty well whence
she had derived that strange and utterly false conception. She had
fancied Perugia as one of those mountain villages described by
Macaulay, the sort of hilltop stronghold
"That, hid by beech and pine,
Like an eagle's nest hangs on the crest
Of purple Apennine."
Instead of that, what manner of land did she see actually before
her? Dry and shadeless hill-sides, tilled with obtrusive tilth to
their topmost summit; ploughed fields and hoary olive-groves
silvering to the wind, in interminable terraces; long suburbs,
unlovely in their gaunt, bare squalor, stretching like huge arms of
some colossal cuttlefish over the spurs and shoulders of that
desecrated mountain.
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