been imperceptibly dimmed again; it blushes with the mingled
colours of minute and numberless flowers--a dust of flowers, in lines
longer than those of ocean billows. This is the desert blossoming like a
rose: not the obvious rose of gardens, but the multitudinous and various
flower that gathers once in the year in every hand's-breadth of the
wilderness. When June comes the sun has burnt all to leagues of
harmonious seed, coloured with a hint of the colour of harvest, which is
gradually changed to the lighter harmonies of winter. All this fine
chromatic scale passes within such modest boundaries that it is accused
as a monotony. But those who find its modesty delightful may have a
still more delicate pleasure in the blooming and blossoming of the sea.
The passing from the winter blue to the summer blue, from the cold colour
to the colour that has in it the fire of the sun, the kindling of the
sapphire of the Mediterranean--the significance of these sea-seasons, so
far from the pasture and the harvest, is imperceptible to ordinary
senses, as appears from the fact that so few stay to see it all
fulfilled. And if the tourist stayed, he would no doubt violate all that
is lovely and moderate by the insistence of his descriptions. He would
find adjectives for the blue sea, but probably he would refuse to search
for words for the white. A white Mediterranean is not in the legend.
Nevertheless it blooms, now and then, pale as an opal; the white sea is
the flower of the breathless midsummer. And in its clear, silent waters,
a few days, in the culmination of the heat, bring forth translucent
living creatures, many-shaped jelly-fish, coloured like mother-of-pearl.

But without going so far from the landscape of daily life, it is in
agricultural Italy that the _little less_ makes so undesignedly, and as
it were so inevitably, for beauty. The country that is formed for use
and purpose only is immeasurably the loveliest. What a lesson in
literature! How feelingly it persuades us that all except a very little
of the ornament of letters and of life makes the dulness of the world.
The tenderness of colour, the beauty of series and perspective, and the
variety of surface, produced by the small culture of vegetables, are
among the charms that come unsought, and that are not to be found by
seeking--are never to be achieved if they are sought for their own sake.
And another of the delights of the useful laborious land is its vital