Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/215

Rh notice she looked on with the eye of the poet and artist, not of the archæologist, and approved or disapproved or passed over it accordingly.

The beauties of nature, at Tivoli and Frascati, appealed much more surely to her sympathies. But of certain sites in the Campagna much vaunted by tourists and hand-books she remarks pertinently: "If you were to pass this village" (Marino) "on the railway within a hundred miles of Paris, you would not pay it the slightest attention." Such places had their individuality, but she upheld that there is not a corner in the universe, "however common-place it may appear, but has a character of its own, unique in this world, for anyone who is disposed to feel or comprehend it." In one of her village tales, a sagacious peasant professes his profound contempt for the man who cannot like the place he belongs to.

Neither the grottoes and cascades of Tivoli, the cypress and ilex gardens of Frascati and Albano, nor the ruins of Tusculum, were ever so pleasant to her eyes as the poplar-fringed banks of the Indre, the cornlands and hedgerows of Berry, and the rocky borders of the Creuse at Crozant and Argenton. She had not ceased making fresh picturesque discoveries in her own neighbourhood. Of these she records an instance in her pleasant Promenades autour d'un village, a lively sketch of a few days' walking-tour on the banks of the Creuse, undertaken by herself and some naturalist