e against pure streaks of alternate blue and amber, the
upper sky gradually flushing through the last fragments of rain-cloud in
deep, palpitating azure, half ether and half dew. The noonday sun came
slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia, and its masses of entangled
and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure
of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with rain. I cannot
call it color, it was conflagration. Purple, and crimson, and scarlet,
like the curtains of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the
valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with buoyant
and burning life; each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the
sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald. Far up into the recesses of
the valley, the green vistas arched like the hollows of mighty waves of
some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks
for foam, and silver flakes of orange spray tossed into the air around
them, breaking over the gray walls of rock into a thousand separate
stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and let
them fall. Every glade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven,
opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as
sheet-lightning opens in a cloud at sunset; the motionless masses of
dark rock--dark though flushed with scarlet lichen,--casting their quiet
shadows across its restless radiance, the fountain underneath them
filling its marble hollow with blue mist and fitful sound, and over
all--the multitudinous bars of amber and rose, the sacred clouds that
have no darkness, and only exist to illumine, were seen in fathomless
intervals between the solemn and orbed repose of the stone pines,
passing to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding lustre of the
measureless line where the Campagna melted into the blaze of the sea.

Sec. 3. Turner himself is inferior in brilliancy to nature.

Tell me who is likest this, Poussin or Turner? Not in his most daring
and dazzling efforts could Turner himself come near it; but you could
not at the time have thought or remembered the work of any other man as
having the remotest hue or resemblance of what you saw. Nor am I
speaking of what is uncommon or unnatural; there is no climate, no
place, and scarcely an hour, in which nature does not exhibit color
which no mortal effort can imitate or approach. For all our artificial
pigments are, even when s