Lastly, the same want of truth is shown in the wide expanse stretching away to the distance:-- "It is luminous, retiring, delicate and perfect in tone, and is quite complete enough to deceive and delight the careless eye to which all distances are alike; nay, it is perfect and masterly, and absolutely right, if we consider it as a sketch,--as a first plan of a distance, afterwards to be carried out in detail. But we must remember that all these alternate spaces of gray and gold are not the landscape itself, but the treatment of it; not its substance, but its light and shade. They are just what nature would cast over it, and write upon it with every cloud, but which she would cast in play, and without carefulness, as matters of the very smallest possible importance. All her work and her attention would be given to bring out from underneath this, and through this, the forms and the material character which this can only be valuable to illustrate, not to conceal. Every one of those broad spaces she would linger over in protracted delight, teaching you fresh lessons in every hair's-breadth of it, until the mind lost itself in following her; now fringing the dark edge of the shadow with a tufted line of level forest; now losing it for an instant in a breath of mist; then breaking it with the white gleaming angle of a narrow brook; then dwelling upon it again in a gentle, mounded, melting undulation, over the other side of which she would carry you down into a dusty space of soft crowded light, with the hedges and the paths and the sprinkled cottages and scattered trees mixed up and mingled together in one beautiful, delicate, impenetrable mystery, sparkling and melting, and passing away into the sky, without one line of distinctness, or one instant of vacancy"[65] (_ibid._, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. v. § 8). 32. THE RAPE OF GANYMEDE. _School of Titian. See under 4._ Ganymede--so the Greek story ran--was a beautiful Trojan boy beloved of Jupiter, and was carried off by an eagle to Olympus to be the cup-bearer of the gods. Which things, say some, are an allegory--for "those whom the gods love die young," and are snatched off, it may be, in sudden death, as by an eagle's swoop. Flushed Ganymede, his rosy thigh Half-buried in the Eagle's down, Sole as a flying star shot thro' the sky. TENNYSON: _Palace of Art_. This picture was painted, like Tintoret's "Milky Way" (1313) and the four Veroneses (1318, 1324-6), for a compartment of a ceiling. It corresponds with a picture described by Ridolfi as painted by a scholar of Titian, though some connect it rather with Tintoret (see J. B. S. Holborn's _Tintoretto_, 1903, pp. 34, 35). It was formerly in the Colonna Palace: the background is a restoration by Carlo Maratti (_see_ 174). 33. THE VISION OF ST. JEROME.