o, day after day, could so falsely
represent what was forever before their eyes, when it was to be one of
the most important and attractive parts of their picture, can scarcely
be expected to give with truth what they could see only partially and at
intervals, and what was only to be in their picture a blue line in the
horizon, or a bright spot under the feet of their figures.

That such should be all the space allotted by the old landscape painters
to the most magnificent phenomena of nature; that the only traces of
those Apennines, which in Claude's walks along the brow of the Pincian,
forever bounded his horizon with their azure wall, should, in his
pictures, be a cold white outline in the extreme of his tame distance;
and that Salvator's sojourns among their fastnesses should only have
taught him to shelter his banditti with such paltry morsels of crag as
an Alpine stream would toss down before it like a foam-globe; though it
may indeed excite our surprise, will, perhaps, when we have seen how
these slight passages are executed, be rather a subject of
congratulation than of regret. It might, indeed, have shortened our
labor in the investigation of mountain truth, had not modern artists
been so vast, comprehensive, and multitudinous in their mountain
drawings, as to compel us, in order to form the slightest estimate of
their knowledge, to enter into some examination of every variety of hill
scenery. We shall first gain some general notion of the broad
organization of large masses, and then take those masses to pieces,
until we come down to the crumbling soil of the foreground.

Sec. 3. General structure of the earth. The hills are its action, the
plains its rest.

Mountains are, to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent
muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its
anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with fierce and convulsive
energy, full of expression, passion, and strength; the plains and the
lower hills are the repose and the effortless motion of the frame, when
its muscles lie dormant and concealed beneath the lines of its beauty,
yet ruling those lines in their every undulation. This, then, is the
first grand principle of the truth of the earth. The spirit of the hills
is action; that of the lowlands, repose; and between these there is to
be found every variety of motion and of rest; from the inactive plain,
sleeping like the firmament, with cities for stars, to