to the ground under their purple weight and wayward
coils as securely as ever human heart was fastened to earth by the net
of the Flatterer.

40. When a rock of any kind has lain for some time exposed to the
weather, Nature finishes it in her own way. First she takes wonderful
pains about its forms, sculpturing it into exquisite variety of dent
and dimple, and rounding or hollowing it into contours which for
fineness no human hand can follow; then she colours it; and every one
of her touches of colour, instead of being a powder mixed with oil, is
a minute forest of living trees, glorious in strength and beauty, and
concealing wonders of structure.

41. On the broken rocks in the foreground in the crystalline groups,
the mosses seem to set themselves consentfully and deliberately to the
task of producing the most exquisite harmonies of colour in their
power. They will not conceal the form of the rock, but will gather
over it in little brown bosses, like small cushions of velvet, made of
mixed threads of dark ruby silk and gold, rounded over more subdued
films of white and grey, with lightly crisped and curled edges like
hoar frost on fallen leaves, and minute clusters of upright orange
stalks with pointed caps, and fibres of deep green, and gold, and
faint purple passing into black, all woven together, and following
with unimaginable fineness of gentle growth the undulation of the
stone they cherish, until it is charged with colour so that it can
receive no more; and instead of looking rugged, or cold, or stern, or
anything that a rock is held to be at heart, it seems to be clothed
with a soft dark leopard's skin, embroidered with arabesque of purple
and silver.

42. The colour of the white varieties of marble is of exquisite
delicacy, owing to the partial translucency of the pure rock; and it
has always appeared to me a most wonderful ordinance--one of the most
_marked_ pieces of purpose in the creation--that all the variegated
kinds should be comparatively opaque, so as to set off the colour on
the surface, while the white, which, if it had been opaque, would have
looked somewhat coarse, (as for instance common chalk does,) is
rendered just translucent enough to give an impression of extreme
purity, but not so translucent as to interfere in the least with the
distinctness of any forms into which it is wrought. The colours of
variegated marbles are also for the most part very beautiful,
especially those compos