 |
and often
as you walk along some street or open piazza, you behold beautiful and astonishing
creations of art and skill – pictures and statues that have a world-wide
fame, and in the contemplation of which you are lost in admiration and delight;
and then as you turn away from these, and look upon the realities of life
around you, you see sad and disgusting evidences of mental darkness, wretchedness,
and low groveling tastes and habits. Go out into the country and you are
struck often with the beauty and richness of valleys, hill-sides and table
lands; you see numerous evergreen trees, cultivated and trained in gardens,
whose walks, arches, towers, and fountains are like the enchantments of
Aladdin’s Lamp; you see a flourishing growth of olives, oranges, figs
and pomegranates; and though on the very verge of winter, and in sight of
snow on mountain peaks in the horizon, whose cool breath you feel, you are
greeted by the way with beautiful hedges of roses, in bud and bloom, as
they adorn the grounds of some villa, or hang over the high walls by the
road side.
And while some of the more pretending villas or cottages please you with
their beauty and neatness, you will not fail to observe many a filthy habitation;
with inmates to correspond; ragged women at work in the fields; donkeys
and cows yoked together, with plows, carts, and other agricultural implements
of crude and awkward construction.
Hands in the city are making tables and jewelry of exquisite mosaic that
cause you to wonder at the perfection of human ingenuity; and hands in the
country are using various utensils of tillage to clumsy and ungainly that
a Yankee would hardly deem them fit for fire-wood or old iron.
|