Where the trees came closest to the road they seemed to watch our
passing, each with its trunk aslant and its branches akimbo, in a
humorous make-believe of being in some joke with us, like so many
gnarled and twisted apple-trees, used to children's play-fellowship. You
felt a racial intimacy with the whimsical and antic shapes which your
brief personal consciousness denied in vain; and you rose among the
slopes around Tivoli with a sense of home-coming from the desert of the
Campagna. But in the distance to which the olive forests stretched they
lost this effect of tricksy familiarity. They looked like a gray sea
against the horizon; more fantastically yet, they seemed a vast hoar
silence, full of mystery and loneliness.
If Tivoli does not flourish so frankly on its oil as Frascati on its
wine, it is perhaps because it has of late years tacitly prospered as
much on the electricity which its wonderful and beautiful waterfalls
enable it to furnish as abundantly to Rome as our own Niagara to
Buffalo.
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