Lombardy poplar

“ Helen was silent from amazement.
"Oh, she has patients at three dollars an hour, real invalids. And she could get more in the city. Joanna knows about the breakfast. Mrs. Van Dorn is wise enough not to gorge her stomach with useless and injurious food. I never saw a person take better care of herself."
It was a very pleasant walk under maples and elms, with here and there an old-fashioned Lombardy poplar; lindens with their fringy tassels, and horse-chestnuts with their dense, spreading leaves. ”

“ Built on a sunny and fertile tract of the Lombard plain, within view of the Alps, and close beneath the shelter of the Apennines, it shines like a well-set gem with stately towers and cheerful squares in the midst of verdure. The cities of Lombardy are all like large country houses: walking out of their gates, you seem to be stepping from a door or window that opens on a trim and beautiful garden, where mulberry-tree is married to mulberry by festoons of vines, and where the maize and sunflower stand together in rows between patches of flax and hemp. ”

“ It was agreed that I should wait for my companions at The White Lion in Venice.
At a short distance from Trent one gets into Lombardy. After a lone and difficult journey across the Alps, during which there is nothing to be seen but the sky and the mountains rearing their heads against the clouds, it was like entering into another world. The air was balmy, the country revelling in green; and if I had wanted a thousand florins' worth of cherries, I could have got them far more easily than in Pomerania in the middle of June. Lombardy is a beautiful land, of fertile and well cultivated plains. ”

“ Ambrogio and its compeers of the era of liberty, a rare fragment of the older imperial civilisation—does he become conscious of the long and painful course of the centuries, and remember that he stands in the secular capital of Lombardy, on ground as storied almost as the sacred dust of Rome.
The name alone of Lombardy calls up visions of continuous strife. There the nations who have made their grave in Italy lie most thickly. The sunny fruitful plains at the foot of the barren mountains have been fattened from the beginning by human blood. ”

“ In vintage time the carts, drawn by their white oxen, come creaking townward in the evening, laden with blue bunches. Down the long straight roads, between rows of poplars, they creep on; and on the shafts beneath the pyramid of fruit lie contadini stained with lees of wine. Far off across that 'waveless sea' of Lombardy, which has been the battlefield of countless generations, rise the dim grey Alps, or else pearled domes of thunder-clouds in gleaming masses over some tall solitary tower. ”

“ But in two ways especially the energetic race which grew out of the fusion of Langobards and Italians between the 9th and the 12th centuries has left the memory of itself. In England, at least, the enterprising traders and bankers who found their way to the West, from the 13th to the 16th centuries, though they certainly did not all come from Lombardy, bore the name of Lombards. ”

“ Lombardy remained the name of the finest province of Italy, and for a time was the name for Italy itself. But what was specially Lombard could not stand in the long run against the Italian atmosphere which surrounded it. Generation after generation passed more and more into real Italians. Antipathies, indeed, survived, and men even in the 10th century called each other Roman or Langobard as terms of reproach. But the altered name of Lombard also denoted henceforth some of the proudest of Italians ”

“ It is a little country town of Lombardy, between Cremona and Treviglio, with no historic memories but very misty ones belonging to the days of the Visconti dynasty. On every side around the city walls stretch smiling vineyards and rich meadows, where the elms are married to the mulberry-trees by long festoons of foliage hiding purple grapes, where the sunflowers droop their heavy golden heads among tall stems of millet and gigantic maize, and here and there a rice-crop ripens in the marshy loam. ”

“ From the 13th century Italian merchants, known as Lombards, from Lucca, Florence, Venice, and Genoa, traded under much odium, largely in England as wool-dealers and bankers, whence the name Lombard Street.
Lombardy (3,982) , an inland territory of Northern Italy between the Alps and the Po, Piedmont, and Venetia. In the N. are Alpine mountains and valleys rich in pasturage; in the S. a very fertile, well irrigated plain, which produces cereals, rice, and sub-tropical plants. The culture of the silkworm is extensive; there are textile and hardware manufactures. ”

“ Lombardy is the garden of Italy. The whole of the extensive valley, from the Alps to the Apennines, is cultivated to the highest degree, presenting in its vineyards, its orchards, its waving fields of grain, its flocks and herds, one of the most rich and attractive features earth can exhibit. Milan, its beautiful capital, abounding in wealth and luxury, contained a population of one hundred and twenty thousand souls. Here Napoleon allowed his weary troops, exhausted by their unparalleled exertions, to repose for six days. ”

“ Not the endless flatness and fruitfulness of Lombardy, where the mists steam up in the evening golden round the great misty golden descending sun-ball, and the buildings flush like the cheeks of Correggio's joy-drunken seraphs, and the thin, clear outline of the rows of poplars looks against the sky like the outshaken golden hair combed into minute filaments of one of Lionardo's women. Nor the dreary wastes of sere oakwoods and livid sand-hills of Orvieto; nor the sea of lush vegetation gilded by the sun, merging into the vaporous damp blue sky of the plain of Lucca. ”

“ Political clubs and newspapers multiplied throughout Lombardy; and actors, authors, and editors joined in a pæan of courtly or fawning praise, to the new Scipio, Cæsar, Hannibal, and Jupiter.
There were other reasons why the Lombards should worship the young victor. Apart from the admiration which a gifted race ever feels for so fascinating a combination of youthful grace with intellectual power and martial prowess, they believed that this Italian hero would call the people to political activity, perchance even to national independence. ”

“ From the garden-student’s point of view, there is nothing in Lombardy as important as the Isola Bella. In these rich Northern provinces, as in the environs of Florence, the old gardens have suffered from the affluence of their owners, and scarcely any have been allowed to retain their original outline. The enthusiasm for the English garden swept over Lombardy like a tidal wave, obliterating terraces and grottoes, substituting winding paths for pleached alleys, and transforming level box-parterres into rolling lawns which turn as brown as door-mats under the scorching Lombard sun. ”

“ If priority in time is to be sought for any of these factors, we must look to Lombardy. The four masks which were indispensable to this dramatic species, and which survived all its vicissitudes, had an undoubted Lombardo-Venetian origin. The Neapolitan masks were superadded, and the Tuscan intrigue formed little more than a conventional framework for the humours of the fixed characters. ”

“ On the contrary, we have no doubt that, could Lombardy receive at once the full license to establish its own form of government, it would split into as many petty states as there are large cities in it, and would be plunged into all the horrors of civil contest. It is a most fortunate thing for the north of Italy that it is under the strong hand of the most steady and respectable power in Europe—one whose rulers will never set it a bad example, who are able to protect it from all aggression, and who watch over its social and internal progress with unceasing care. ”

“ Lombardy, teeming as she is, with population, vines, and all the productions of a fertile soil, in the possession of millions, sinks into insignificance before the vast plains that are destined to be her rivals in this quarter of the world. Perhaps New-York alone could furnish nearly as much of this character of country as is to be found in Upper Italy ”

“ Neither of the rival claimants put forward by the two parties succeeded in establishing himself on the episcopal throne. Chaos prevailed in the Ambrosian Church. Erlembaldo, strengthened by the accession of Hildebrand as Pope Gregory VII., usurped the whole authority in the city and throughout the archdiocese. He swept far and wide like an avenging sword, driving priests from their benefices, and tearing them from the altars. Half Lombardy cowered under his rude and noisy tyranny, and his name became a by-word of terror throughout Italy. ”

“ Verona, and the murder of his father, already miserably deposed, Gian Galeazzo had planted himself upon a level with kings.
Almost the whole of Lombardy was under his sway, and that sway extended from Verceli in Piedmont to Feltre and Bellvino. Florence, lately leagued against him in support of his deposed father, had been beaten in battle after battle and was glad to escape, shorn of her fairest possessions, and cherishing only her liberty.
All this Giannotto knew. ”

“ Since it is always said in books that Lombardy is a furnace in summer, and that whole great armies have died of the heat there, this river bank would make a fine refuge. Clear and delicious water, more limpid than glass, would reflect and echo the restless poplars, and would make tolerable or even pleasing the excessive summer. ”

“ Moreover, during all the period of their journey, while some have gained by practice in handicraft, and the experience of repeated essays at their various halting-places, the minds of all have been busy framing designs and planning the improvements they have since found [Pg 585] opportunity to execute. Their territory is unequalled as a stock-raising country; the finest pastures of Lombardy are not more estimable than those on the east side of the Utah Lake and its tributary rivers, and it is scarcely less rich in timber and minerals than the most fortunate portions of the continent. ”

“ I do not pay with ducats, Paduans, or measure my rewards with coin; follow me, and I will give you cities for your plunder, and nobles to hold for ransom. Like to the thunder will I circle Lombardy, and city after city shall surrender me its keys, and the meanest soldier in my train shall gain him fame and riches from my spreading greatness such as kings might envy! Now, who but a faint heart would follow Della Scala, who lost into my hands his very wife? So long as there is a Visconti, he rules in Italy! ”

“ Those who stood and gazed upon its wide-extended front, as, rushing on irresistible, it swept the fair plains of Lombardy, might well want language and figures to express the awful advance of the barbarian world.
The dark thunder-cloud, sweeping at once over the clear blue sky, and shutting out sunshine and daylight beneath its ominous veil, is too slow in its course, too unsubstantial in its form, to afford an image of that living inundation. ”

“ The road lies through a richly cultivated country: the immense plain around us is bounded to the north by the mountains of the Tyrol, amongst which we seemed to have lost ourselves for an age, so refreshing, so new, so enchanting, is the wide expanse of fertile Lombardy, opening before our eyes. ”

“ As much as any state of the Continent has it cause to abhor those systems of anarchy which, under the guise of patriotism, lead only to revolution and misery: and as one of the great conservators of the monarchical principle in politics, it is called upon, by its very station and dignity, to check rather than to encourage what may very possibly prove to be only a spurious attempt to gain licentiousness, rather than freedom. Lombardy, no doubt, is allied to its illustrious rulers most unwillingly ”

“ An Austrian regiment marched into the town as we left it, and an Italian at the gate told us that the Duchess had disbanded her last troops of the country, and supplied their place with these yellow and black Croats and Illyrians. Italy is Austria now to the foot of the Apennines—if not to the top of Radicofani.
Lombardy is full of nightingales. They sing by day, however (as not specified in poetry) . They are up quite as early as the lark, and the green hedges are alive with their gurgling and 429 changeful music till twilight. Nothing can exceed the fertility of these endless plains. ”

“ As the flower of Bramante's life went by during his long stay in Upper Italy, it is there that his pictorial talents must be appreciated, and that his most numerous, if not his most famous fabrics, may be found. But when Lombardy became the battle-field of Italian independence, when art was there neglected and personal safety compromised, he bethought him of the monuments of antique genius still scattered over the capital of her classic times, and came to Rome in quest of improvement as well as employment. ”

“ The door was again thrown wide, this time upon a splendid cavalier, clad in magnificent armor, shining beneath his travel-stained scarlet cloak.
"Success rest upon your helm, Visconti, for Lombardy to Belluno is yours!" He swept his cap off, and stood, flushed and panting, before the eager, excited company, who rose to a man.
"Modena?" asked Visconti. "And Mantua?"
"Yours," said Guido d'Arezzo. "And of Ferrara I myself received the keys, and rode post-haste to Milan, through a country that dared not raise a finger, where even the nobles came uncovered to my stirrup ”