Though It Was Midsummer, The Light Had Come Quickly.
Long after
sunrise the mist dispersed, and the nature of the valley appeared.
It was in no way mountainous, but easy, pleasant, and comfortable,
bounded by low, rounded hills, having upon them here and there a row
of cypresses against the sky; and it was populous with pleasant farms.
Though the soil was baked and dry, as indeed it is everywhere in this
south, yet little regular streams (or canals) irrigated it and
nourished many trees - - but the deep grass of the north was wanting.
For an hour or more after sunrise I continued my way very briskly;
then what had been the warmth of the early sun turned into the violent
heat of day, and remembering Merlin where he says that those who will
walk by night must sleep by day, and having in my mind the severe
verses of James Bayle, sometime Fellow of St Anne's, that 'in Tuscan
summers as a general rule, the days are sultry but the nights are
cool' (he was no flamboyant poet; he loved the quiet diction of the
right wing of English poetry), and imagining an owlish habit of
sleeping by day could be acquired at once, I lay down under a tree of
a kind I had never seen; and lulled under the pleasant fancy that this
was a picture-tree drawn before the Renaissance, and that I was
reclining in some background landscape of the fifteenth century (for
the scene was of that kind), I fell asleep.
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