You will love it always and for
its own sake more than anything else in Ravenna, and in this you will
not be alone; every one who has come to it these thousand years has
felt the same, Dante, Boccaccio, Byron, Carducci, the Pineta knows the
footsteps of them all and they seem to haunt it still.
Dante would seem to have loved it best in the morning; out of it he
conjures his _Paradiso Terrestre_ in the twenty-eighth canto of the
_Purgatorio_:
"Through that celestial forest, whose thick shade
With lively greenness the new-springing day
Attemper'd, eager now to roam, and search
Its limits round, forthwith I left the bank;
Along the champain leisurely my way
Pursuing, o'er the ground, that on all sides
Delicious odour breathed. A pleasant air
That intermitted never, never veer'd,
Smote on my temples, gently as a wind
Of softest influence, at which the sprays,
Obedient all, lean'd trembling to that part
Where first the holy mountain casts his shade,
Yet were not so disordered, but that still
Upon their top the feathered quiristers
Applied their wonted art, and with full joy
Welcomed those hours of prime, and warbled shrill
Amid the leaves that to their jocund lays
Kept tenour; even as from branch to branch
Along the piny forests on the shore
Of Chiassi rolls the gathering melody
When Eolus hath from his cavern loosed
The dripping south.
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