the air upon the neighbouring marsh is poisonous, here it is dry, and spreads a genial health.  The sea-wind murmuring through these thickets at nightfall or misty sunrise, conveys no fever to the peasants stretched among their flowers.  They watch the red rays of sunset flaming through the columns of the leafy hall, and flaring on its fretted rafters of entangled boughs; they see the stars come out, and Hesper gleam, an eye of brightness, among dewy branches; the moon walks silver-footed on the velvet tree-tops, while they sleep beside the camp-fires; fresh morning wakes them to the sound of birds and scent of thyme and twinkling of dewdrops on the grass around.  Meanwhile ague, fever, and death have been stalking all night long about the plain, within a few yards of their couch, and not one pestilential breath has reached the charmed precincts of the forest.

You may ride or drive for miles along green aisles between the pines in perfect solitude; and yet the creatures of the wood, the sunlight and the birds, the flowers and tall majestic columns at your side, prevent all sense of loneliness or fear.  Huge oxen haunt the wilderness—­grey creatures, with mild eyes and spreading horns and stealthy tread.  Some are patriarchs of the forest, the fathers and the mothers of many generations who have been carried from their sides to serve in ploughs or waggons on the Lombard plain.  Others are yearling calves, intractable and ignorant of labour.  In order to subdue them to the yoke, it is requisite to take them very early from their native glades, or else they chafe and pine away with weariness.  Then there is a sullen canal, which flows through the forest from the marshes to the sea; it is alive with frogs and newts and snakes.  You may see these serpents basking on the surface among thickets of the flowering rush, or coiled about the lily leaves and flowers—­lithe monsters, slippery and speckled, the tyrants of the fen.

It is said that when Dante was living at Ravenna he would spend whole days alone among the forest glades, thinking of Florence and her civil wars, and meditating cantos of his poem.  Nor have the influences of the pine-wood failed to leave their trace upon his verse.  The charm of its summer solitude seems to have sunk into his soul; for when he describes the whispering of winds and singing birds among the boughs of his terrestrial paradise, he says:—­

  Non pero dal lor esser dritto sparte
    Tanto, che gli augelletti per le cime
    Lasciasser d’ operare ogni lor arte: 
  Ma con piena letizia l’ aure prime,
    Cantando, ricevano intra le foglie,
    Che tenevan bordone alle sue rime
  Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie
    Per la pineta in sul lito di Chiassi
    Quand’ Eolo Scirocco fuor discioglie.