Together with this great source of pre-eminence in _mass_ of colour,
we have to estimate the influence of the finished inlaying and
enamel-work of the colour-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 oxalisis pre-eminently a mountaineer.[26]
To this supremacy in mosses and flowers we have next to add an
inestimable gain in the continual presence and power of water. Neither
in its clearness, its colour, its fantasy of motion, its calmness of
space, depth, and reflection, or its wrath, can water be conceived by
a lowlander, out of sight of sea.
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