All along the valleys of the coast are hundreds of these amphitheatres
which are as stages whereon, by moonlight or amid the peace of the
mornings and afternoons, are acted the dumb fairy-plays of the world's
contentment. They are all alike, and yet each of them reveals a
different happiness. Each of them, as though they were the faces of a
bevy of equally happy and equally beautiful sisters, wears its
distinguishing smile. A cluster of cypresses, with its pure outline, a
mimosa that resembles a bubbling spring of sulphur, a grove of
orange-trees with dark and heavy tops symmetrically charged with golden
fruits that suddenly proclaim the royal affluence of the soil that feeds
them, a slope covered with lemon-trees, where the night seems to have
heaped up on a mountain-side, to await a new twilight, the stars
gathered by the dawn, a leafy portico which opens over the sea like a
deep glance that suddenly discloses an infinite thought, a brook hidden
like a tear of joy, a trellis awaiting the purple of the grapes, a great
stone basin drinking in the water that trickles from the tip of a green
reed: all and yet none modify the expression of the restfulness, the
tranquillity, the azure silence, the blissfulness that is its own
delight.