The purity of all the Italian love-songs collected by Tigri is very remarkable.[27] Although the passion expressed in them is Oriental in its vehemence, not a word falls which could offend a virgin’s ear.  The one desire of lovers is lifelong union in marriage.  The damo—­for so a sweetheart is termed in Tuscany—­trembles until he has gained the approval of his future mother-in-law, and forbids the girl he is courting to leave her house to talk to him at night:—­

  Dice che tu ti affacci alia finestra;
  Ma non ti dice che tu vada fuora,
  Perche, la notte, e cosa disonesta.

All the language of his love is respectful. Signore, or master of my soul, madonna, anima mia, dolce mio ben, nobil persona, are the terms of adoration with which he approaches his mistress.  The elevation of feeling and perfect breeding which Manzoni has so well delineated in the loves of Renzo and Lucia are traditional among Italian country-folk.  They are conscious that true gentleness is no matter of birth or fortune:—­

  E tu non mi lasciar per poverezza,
  Che poverta non guasta gentilezza.[28]

This in itself constitutes an important element of culture, and explains to some extent the high romantic qualities of their impassioned poetry.  The beauty of their land reveals still more.  ’O fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint!’ Virgil’s exclamation is as true now as it was when he sang the labours of Italian country-folk some nineteen centuries ago.  To a traveller from the north there is a pathos even in the contrast between the country in which these children of a happier climate toil, and those bleak, winter-beaten fields where our own peasants pass their lives.  The cold nights and warm days of Tuscan springtime are like a Swiss summer.  They make rich pasture and a hardy race of men.  Tracts of corn and oats and rye alternate with patches of flax in full flower, with meadows yellow with buttercups or pink with ragged robin; the young vines, running from bough to bough of elm and mulberry, are just coming into leaf.  The poplars are fresh with bright green foliage.  On the verge of this blooming plain stand ancient cities ringed with hills, some rising to snowy Apennines, some covered with white convents and sparkling with villas.  Cypresses shoot, black and spirelike, amid grey clouds of olive-boughs upon the slopes; and above, where vegetation borders on the barren rock, are masses of ilex and arbutus interspersed with chestnut-trees not yet in leaf.  Men and women are everywhere at work, ploughing with great white oxen, or tilling the soil with spades six feet in length—­Sabellian ligones.  The songs of nightingales among acacia-trees, and the sharp scream of swallows wheeling in air, mingle with the monotonous chant that always rises from the country-people at their toil.  Here and there on points of vantage, where the hill-slopes sink into the plain, cluster white villages with flower-like campanili.  It