With Half-Closed Eyes, One Could Imagine The True
Tarentum.
Wavelets lapped upon the sand before me, their music the
same as two thousand years ago.
A goatherd came along, his flock
straggling behind him; man and goats were as much of the old world
as of the new. Far away, the boats of fishermen floated silently. I
heard a rustle as an old fig tree hard by dropped its latest leaves.
On the sea-bank of yellow crumbling earth lizards flashed about me
in the sunshine. After a dull morning, the day had passed into
golden serenity; a stillness as of eternal peace held earth and sky.
"Dearest of all to me is that nook of earth which yields not to
Hymettus for its honey, nor for its olive to green Venafrum; where
heaven grants a long springtime and warmth in winter, and in the
sunny hollows Bacchus fosters a vintage noble as the Falernian - - "
The lines of Horace sang in my head; I thought, too, of the praise
of Virgil, who, tradition has it, wrote his Eclogues hereabouts.
Of course, the country has another aspect. in spring and early
summer; I saw it at a sad moment; but, all allowance made for
seasons, it is still with wonder that one recalls the rapture of the
poets. A change beyond conception must have come upon these shores
of the Ionian Sea. The scent of rosemary seemed to be wafted across
the ages from a vanished world.
After all, who knows whether I have seen the Galaesus?
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