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第3章 如花的托斯卡納FloweryTuscany(2)

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The daisies are out too,in sheets,and they too red-mouthed.The first ones are big and handsome.But as March goes on,the dwindle to bright little things,like tiny buttons,clouds of them together.That means summer is nearly here.

In some places there are odd yellow tulips,slender,spiky and Chineselooking.They are very lovely,pricking out their dulled yellow in slim spikes.But they too soon lean,expand beyond themselves,and are gone like an illusion.

And when the tulips are gone,there is a moment’s pause,before summer.Summer is the next move.

In the pause towards the end of April,when the flowers seem to hesitate,the leaves make up their minds to come out.For sometime,at the very ends of the bare boughs of fig trees,spurts of pure green have been burning like little cloven tongues of green fire vivid on the tips of the candelabrum.Now these spurtsof green spread out,and begin to take the shape of hands,feeling for the air of summer.And tiny green figs are below them,like glands on the throat of a goat.

Now the aspens on the hill are all remarkable with the translucent membranes of blood-veined leaves.They are gold-brown,but not like autumn,rather like thin wings bats when like birds-call them birds-they wheel in clouds against the setting sun,and the sun glows through the stretched membrane of their wings,as through thin,brown-red stained glass.This is the red sap of summer,not the red dust of autumn.

The cherry tree is something the same,but more sturdy.Now,in the last week of April,the cherry blossom is still white,but waning and passing away:it is late this year,and the leaves are clustering thick and softly copper in their dark blood-filled glow.It is queer about fruit trees in this district.The pear and the peach were out together.But now the pear tree is a lovely thick softness of new and glossy green,vivid with a tender fullness of apple-green leaves,gleaming among all the other green of the landscape,the half-high wheat,emerald,and the grey olive,half-invisible,the browning green of the dark cypress,the black of the evergreen oak,the rolling of the heavy green puffs of the stone-pines,the flimsy green of small peach and almond trees,the sturdy young green of horse-chestnut.So many greens,all in flakes and shelves and tilted tables and round shoulders and plumes and shaggles and uprisen bushes,of greens and greens,sometimes blindingly brilliant at evening,when the landscape looks as if it were on fire from inside,with greenness and with gold.