Nor in such instances as these alone, though strangely enough, the
discrepancy between apparent and actual beauty is greater in proportion
to the unapproachableness of the object, is the law observed. For every
distance from the eye there is a peculiar kind of beauty, or a different
system of lines of form; the sight of that beauty is reserved for that
distance, and for that alone. If you approach nearer, that kind of
beauty is lost, and another succeeds, to be disorganised and reduced to
strange and incomprehensible means and appliances in its turn. If you
desire to perceive the great harmonies of the form of a rocky mountain,
you must not ascend upon its sides. All is there disorder and accident,
or seems so; sudden starts of its shattered beds hither and thither;
ugly struggles of unexpected strength from under the ground; fallen
fragments, toppling one over another into more helpless fall. Retire
from it, and, as your eye commands it more and more, as you see the
ruined mountain world with a wider glance, behold! dim sympathies begin
to busy themselves in the disjointed mass; line binds itself into
stealthy fellowship with line; group by group, the helpless fragments
gather themselves into ordered companies; new captains of hosts and
masses of battalions become visible, one by one, and far away answers of
foot to foot, and of bone to bone, until the powerless chaos is seen
risen up with girded loins, and not one piece of all the unregarded heap
could now be spared from the mystic whole.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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