There is not as much colour in that low amber light upon the hill-side
as there is in the palest dead leaf. The lake is not blue, but grey in
mist, passing into deep shadow beneath the Voirons' pines; a few dark
clusters of leaves, a single white flower--scarcely seen--are all the
gladness given to the rocks of the shore. One of the ruby spots of the
eastern manuscript would give colour enough for all the red that is in
Turner's entire drawing. For the mere pleasure of the eye, there is
not so much in all those lines of his, throughout the entire
landscape, as in half an inch square of the Persian's page. What made
him take pleasure in the low colour that is only like the brown of a
dead leaf? in the cold grey of dawn--in the one white flower among the
rocks--in these--and no more than these?
He took pleasure in them because he had been bred among English fields
and hills; because the gentleness of a great race was in his heart,
and its power of thought in his brain; because he knew the stories of
the Alps, and of the cities at their feet; because he had read the
Homeric legends of the clouds, and beheld the gods of dawn, and the
givers of dew to the fields; because he knew the faces of the crags,
and the imagery of the passionate mountains, as a man knows the face
of his friend; because he had in him the wonder and sorrow concerning
life and death, which are the inheritance of the Gothic soul from the
days of its first sea kings; and also the compassion and the joy that
are woven into the innermost fabric of every great imaginative spirit,
born now in countries that have lived by the Christian faith with any
courage or truth.
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