‘Look at the colours of that Foreland!’ cried Claude. ‘The simple monotone of pearly green, broken only at intervals by blood-red stains, where the turf has slipped and left the fresh rock bare, and all glimmering softly through a delicate blue haze, like the bloom on a half-ripened plum!’ ‘And look, too, how the grey pebble beach is already dancing and quivering in the mirage which steams up, like the hot breath of a limekiln, from the drying stones. Talk of “glazings and scumblings,” ye artists! and bungle at them as you will, what are they to Nature’s own glazings, deepening every instant there behind us?’ ‘Mock me not. I have walked up and down here with a humbled and broken spirit, and had nearly forsworn the audacity of painting anything beyond a beech stem, or a frond of fern.’ ‘The little infinite in them would have baffled you as much as the only somewhat bigger infinite of just the hills on which they grow.’ ‘Confest: and so farewell to unpaintable Lynmouth! Farewell to the charming contrast of civilized English landscape-gardening, with its villas, and its exotics, and its evergreens, thus strangely and yet harmoniously confronted with the chaos of the rocks and mountain-streams. Those grounds of Sir William H—’s are a double paradise, the wild Eden of the Past side by side with the cultivated Eden of the Future. How its alternations of Art and Savagery at once startle and relieve the sense, as you pass suddenly out of wildernesses of piled boulders, and torrent-shattered trees, and the roar of fern-fringed waterfalls, into “trim walks, and fragrant alleys green;” and the door of a summer-house transports you at a step from Richmond to the Alps. Happy he who “possesses,” as the world calls it, and happier still he whose taste could organize, that fairy bower.’ So he, magniloquently, as was his wont; and yet his declamations always flowed with such a graceful ease,—a simple, smiling earnestness,—an unpractised melody of voice, that what would have been rant from other lips, from his showed only as the healthy enthusiasm of the passionate, all-seeing, all-loving artist. ‘Look yonder, again,’ said he, gazing up at the huge boulder-strewn hill-side above us. ‘One wonders at that sight, whether the fable of the giants be not true after all,—and that “Vale of Rocks,” hanging five hundred feet in air, with all its crag-castles, and tottering battlements, and colossal crumbling idols, and great blocks, which hang sloping, caught in act to fall, be not some enormous Cyclopean temple left half-disinterred: or is it a fragment of old Chaos, left unorganized?—or, perhaps, the waste heap of the world, where, after the rest of England had been made, some angel put up a notice for his fellows, “Dry rubbish shot here”?’