the Hawk, or even Eagle, soaring high up in
the air, the weird cry of the Marmot, and the knowledge that, even if
one cannot see Chamois, they may all the time be looking down on us,
give the Alps, from this point of view also, a special interest of their
own.

Another great charm of mountain districts is the richness of colour.
"Consider,[38] first, the difference produced in the whole tone of
landscape colour by the introductions of purple, violet, and deep
ultra-marine blue which we owe to mountains. In an ordinary lowland
landscape we have the blue of the sky; the green of the 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 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."

"I do not know," he says elsewhere, "any district possessing a more pure
or uninterrupted fulness of mountain character (and that of the highest
order), or which appears to have been less disturbed by foreign
agencies, than that which borders the course of the Trient between
Valorsine and Martigny. The paths which lead to it, out of the valley of
the Rhone, rising at first in steep circles among the walnut trees, like
winding stairs among the pillars of a Gothic tower, retire over the
shoulders of the hills into a valley almost unknown, but thickly
inhabited by an industrious and patient population. Along the ridges of
the