Sec. 4. For consider, first, the difference produced in the whole tone of
landscape color by the introductions of purple, violet, and deep
ultramarine blue, which we owe to mountains. In an ordinary lowland
landscape we have the blue of the sky; the green of grass, which I will
suppose (and this is an unnecessary concession to the lowlands) entirely
fresh and bright; the green of trees; and certain elements of purple,
far more rich and beautiful than we generally should think, in their
bark and shadows (bare hedges and thickets, or tops of trees, in subdued
afternoon sunshine, are nearly perfect purple, and of an exquisite
tone), as well as in ploughed fields, and dark ground in general. But
among mountains, in _addition_ to all this, large unbroken spaces of
pure violet and purple are introduced in their distances; and even near,
by films of cloud passing over the darkness of ravines or forests, blues
are produced of the most subtle tenderness; these azures and
purples[107] passing into rose-color of otherwise wholly unattainable
delicacy among the upper summits, the blue of the sky being at the same
time purer and deeper than in the plains. Nay, in some sense, a person
who has never seen the rose-color of the rays of dawn crossing a blue
mountain twelve or fifteen miles away, can hardly be said to know what
_tenderness_ in color means at all; _bright_ tenderness he may, indeed,
see in the sky or in a flower, but this grave tenderness of the far-away
hill-purples he cannot conceive.
Sec. 5. Together with this great source of preeminence in _mass_ of color,
we have to estimate the influence of the finished inlaying and
enamel-work of the color-jewellery on every stone; and that of the
continual variety in species of flower; most of the mountain flowers
being, besides, separately lovelier than the lowland ones. The wood
hyacinth and wild rose are, indeed, the only _supreme_ flowers that the
lowlands can generally show; and the wild rose is also a mountaineer,
and more fragrant in the hills, while the wood hyacinth, or grape
hyacinth, at its best cannot match even the dark bell-gentian, leaving
the light-blue star-gentian in its uncontested queenliness, and the
Alpine rose and Highland heather wholly without similitude. The violet,
lily of the valley, crocus, and wood anemone are, I suppose, claimable
partly by the plains as well as the hills; but the large orange lily and
narcissus I have never seen but on hill pastures, and the exquisite
oxalis is preeminently a mountaineer.[108]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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