For consider, first, the difference produced in the whole tone of
landscape colour 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[25] passing into rose-colour 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-colour of the rays of dawn crossing a blue mountain twelve or
fifteen miles away, can hardly be said to know what _tenderness_ in
colour 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.
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