therefore they were dead to its beauty.  This is mere vanity:  the mountains, stars, seas, fields, and living things were only swallowed up in the one thought of God, and made subordinate to the awfulness of human destinies.  We to whom hills are hills, and seas are seas, and stars are ponderable quantities, speak, write, and reason of them as of objects interesting in themselves.  The monks were less ostensibly concerned about such things, because they only found in them the vestibules and symbols of a hidden mystery.

The contrast between the Greek and mediaeval modes of regarding Nature is not a little remarkable.  Both Greeks and monks, judged by nineteenth-century standards, were unobservant of natural beauties.  They make but brief and general remarks upon landscapes and the like.  The [Greek:  pontion te kumaton anerithmon gelasma] is very rare.  But the Greeks stopped at the threshold of Nature; the forces they found there, the gods, were inherent in Nature, and distinct.  They did not, like the monks, place one spiritual power, omnipotent and omnipresent, above all, and see in Nature lessons of Divine government.  We ourselves having somewhat overstrained the latter point of view, are now apt to return vaguely to Greek fancies.  Perhaps, too, we talk so much about scenery because it is scenery to us, and the life has gone out of it.

I cannot leave the Cornice without one word about a place which lies between Mentone and San Remo.  Bordighera has a beauty which is quite distinct from both.  Palms are its chief characteristics.  They lean against the garden walls, and feather the wells outside the town, where women come with brazen pitchers to draw water.  In some of the marshy tangles of the plain, they spring from a thick undergrowth of spiky leaves, and rear their tall aerial arms against the deep blue background of the sea or darker purple of the distant hills.  White pigeons fly about among their branches, and the air is loud with cooings and with rustlings, and the hoarser croaking of innumerable frogs.  Then, in the olive-groves that stretch along the level shore, are labyrinths of rare and curious plants, painted tulips and white periwinkles, flinging their light of blossoms and dark glossy leaves down the swift channels of the brawling streams.  On each side of the rivulets they grow, like sister cataracts of flowers instead of spray.  At night fresh stars come out along the coast, beneath the stars of heaven; for you can see the lamps of Ventimiglia and Mentone and Monaco, and, far away, the lighthouses upon the promontories of Antibes and the Estrelles.  At dawn, a vision of Corsica grows from the sea.  The island lies eighty miles away, but one can trace the dark strip of irregular peaks glowing amid the gold and purple of the rising sun.  If the air is clear and bright, the snows and overvaulting clouds which crown its mountains shine all day, and glitter like an apparition in the bright blue sky.  ‘Phantom fair,’ half raised above the sea, it stands, as unreal and transparent as the moon when seen in April sunlight, yet not to be confounded with the shape of any cloud.  If Mentone speaks of Greek legends, and San Romolo restores the monastic past, we feel ourselves at Bordighera transported to the East; and lying under its tall palms can fancy ourselves at Tyre or Daphne, or in the gardens of a Moslem prince.