No American evergreen known to me resembles the umbrella pine sufficiently to be a fair object of comparison with it.[292] A cedar, very common above the Highlands on the Hudson, is extremely like the cypress, straight, slender, with erect, compressed ramification, and feathered to the ground, but its foliage is neither so dark nor so dense, the tree does not attain the majestic height of the cypress, nor has it the lithe flexibility of that tree. In mere shape, the Lombardy poplar nearly resembles this latter, but it is almost a profanation to compare the two, especially when they are agitated by the wind; for under such circumstances, the one is the most majestic, the other the most ungraceful, or--if I may apply such an expression to anything but human affectation of movement--the most awkward of trees. The poplar trembles before the blast, flutters, struggles wildly, dishevels its foliage, gropes around with its feeble branches, and hisses as in impotent passion. The cypress gathers its limbs still more closely to its stem, bows a gracious salute rather than an humble obeisance to the tempest, bends to the wind with an elasticity that assures you of its prompt return to its regal attitude, and sends from its thick leaflets a murmur like the roar of the far-off ocean. The cypress and the umbrella pine are not merely conventional types of the Italian landscape. They are essential elements in a field of rural beauty which can be seen in perfection only in the basin of the Mediterranean, and they are as characteristic of this class of scenery as the date palm is of the oases of the desert. There is, however, this difference: a single cypress or pine is often enough to shed beauty over a wide area; the palm is a social tree, and its beauty is not so much that of the individual as of the group. The frequency of the cypress and the pine--combined with the fact that the other trees of Southern Europe which most interest a stranger from the north, the orange and the lemon, the cork oak, the ilex, the myrtle, and the laurel, are evergreens--goes far to explain the beauty of the winter scenery of Italy. Indeed it is only in the winter that a tourist who confines himself to wheel carriages and high roads can acquire any notion of the face of the earth, and form any proper geographical image of that country. At other seasons, not high walls only, but equally impervious hedges, and now, unhappily, acacias thickly planted along the railway routes, confine the view so completely, that the arch of a tunnel, or a night cap over the traveller's eyes, is scarcely a more effectual obstacle to the gratification of his curiosity.[293] _Sylviculture._