Their Leaves Are Now Of The
Brightest Gold And Deepest Red; And Never Was Anything So
Enchantingly Graceful And Full Of Beauty.
Through miles of these
delightful forms and colours, the road winds its way.
The wild
festoons, the elegant wreaths, and crowns, and garlands of all
shapes; the fairy nets flung over great trees, and making them
prisoners in sport; the tumbled heaps and mounds of exquisite
shapes upon the ground; how rich and beautiful they are! And every
now and then, a long, long line of trees, will be all bound and
garlanded together: as if they had taken hold of one another, and
were coming dancing down the field!
Parma has cheerful, stirring streets, for an Italian town; and
consequently is not so characteristic as many places of less note.
Always excepting the retired Piazza, where the Cathedral,
Baptistery, and Campanile--ancient buildings, of a sombre brown,
embellished with innumerable grotesque monsters and dreamy-looking
creatures carved in marble and red stone--are clustered in a noble
and magnificent repose. Their silent presence was only invaded,
when I saw them, by the twittering of the many birds that were
flying in and out of the crevices in the stones and little nooks in
the architecture, where they had made their nests. They were busy,
rising from the cold shade of Temples made with hands, into the
sunny air of Heaven. Not so the worshippers within, who were
listening to the same drowsy chaunt, or kneeling before the same
kinds of images and tapers, or whispering, with their heads bowed
down, in the selfsame dark confessionals, as I had left in Genoa
and everywhere else.
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