The princess is, however, pleased by his address, and tells him to wait outside the town, till she can speak to her father about him.  The spot to which she directs him is another ideal piece of landscape, composed of a “beautiful grove of aspen poplars, a fountain, and a meadow,"[92] near the road-side:  in fact, as nearly as possible such a scene as meets the eye of the traveller every instant on the much-despised lines of road through lowland France; for instance, on the railway between Arras and Amiens;—­scenes, to my mind, quite exquisite in the various grouping and grace of their innumerable poplar avenues, casting sweet, tremulous shadows over their level meadows and labyrinthine streams.  We know that the princess means aspen poplars, because soon afterwards we find her fifty maid-servants at the palace, all spinning and in perpetual motion, compared to the “leaves of the tall poplar”; and it is with exquisite feeling that it is made afterwards[93] the chief tree in the groves of Proserpine; its light and quivering leafage having exactly the melancholy expression of fragility, faintness, and inconstancy which the ancients attributed to the disembodied spirit.[94] The likeness to the poplars by the streams of Amiens is more marked still in the Iliad, where the young Simois, struck by Ajax, falls to the earth “like an aspen that has grown in an irrigated meadow, smooth-trunked, the soft shoots springing from its top, which some coach-making man has cut down with his keen iron, that he may fit a wheel of it to a fair chariot, and it lies parching by the side of the stream."[95] It is sufficiently notable that Homer, living in mountainous and rocky countries, dwells thus delightedly on all the flat bits; and so I think invariably the inhabitants of mountain countries do, but the inhabitants of the plains do not, in any similar way, dwell delightedly on mountains.  The Dutch painters are perfectly contented with their flat fields and pollards;[96] Rubens, though he had seen the Alps, usually composes his landscapes of a hayfield or two, plenty of pollards and willows, a distant spire, a Dutch house with a moat about it, a windmill, and a ditch.  The Flemish sacred painters are the only ones who introduce mountains in the distance, as we shall see presently; but rather in a formal way than with any appearance of enjoyment.  So Shakspere never speaks of mountains with the slightest joy, but only of lowland flowers, flat fields, and Warwickshire streams.  And if we talk to the mountaineer, he will usually characterize his own country to us as a “pays affreux,” or in some equivalent, perhaps even more violent, German term:  but the lowland peasant does not think his country frightful; he either will have no ideas beyond it, or about it; or will think it a very perfect country, and be apt to regard any deviation from its general principle of flatness with extreme disfavour; as the Lincolnshire farmer in Alton Locke:  “I’ll shaw ’ee some’at like a field o’ beans, I wool—­none o’ this here darned ups and downs o’ hills, to shake a body’s victuals out of his inwards—­all so vlat as a barn’s vloor, for vorty mile on end—­there’s the country to live in!"[97]