Thomas_Anderson  +  603576 Wed, 03 Dec 08 05:06 PM "Darkness was falling over the ancient Grecian monastery and the first of the evening stars were beginning to twinkle in the cloudless Aegean sky. The sea was calm, the air was still and did indeed, as is so often claimed for it, smell of wine and roses. A yellow moon, almost full, had just cleared the horizon and bathed in its soft and benign light the softly rolling landscape and lent a magical quality to the otherwise rather harsh and forbidding outlines of the dark and brooding monastery which, any evidence to the contrary, slumbered on peacefully as it had done for countless centuries gone by." This is from River Of Death by Alistair Maclean. I am confused in two expressions 1- Wine and roses What does it means? In which situations we can use this expression? 2- rolling landscape I googled about rolling landscape. My idea is that rolling hills or rolling landscape means an area which has many small hills or many slopes. Rolling landscape in the above excerpt means a land which is not flat or plain. It has many ups and downs. Am I right? Thomas_Anderson Joined on Wed, Dec 3 2008 Junior Member 61 Education, Information and Software should be free and unrestricted.

	AlpheccaStars  +  603672 Wed, 03 Dec 08 06:56 PM " Wine and roses". There was a movie titled "The days of wine and roses". In this title, it means romantic and nostalgic.  In Maclean's passage, it just means that the air was perfumed with the smells of wine (an alcoholic drink made for fruit, usually grapes) and roses (a flower prized for its beauty and fragrance). Rolling landscape means the land you can see has gentle hills - not mountains, not plains, and not high steep hills.  AlpheccaStars Joined on Sun, Oct 12 2008 Senior Member 3,508 The pen is mightier than the sword. Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873)