. Everything, in short, is reduced most
philosophically to its absolutely ultimate elements; and beauty is got
rid of almost as completely as by a metaphysical definition. This
aesthetic barrenness of winter is most of all felt in southern climates,
to which it brings none of the harsh glitter and glamour of snow and
ice; but leaves the frozen earth and leafless trees merely bare, without
the crisp sheen of snow, the glint and glimmer of frost and icicles,
forming for the denuded rigging of branches a fantastic system of ropes
and folded sails. In the South, therefore, unless you go where winter
never comes, and autumn merely merges into a lengthened spring, winter
is more than ever negative, dreary, barren to our fancy. Yet even this
southern winter gives one things, very lovely things: things which one
scarcely notices perhaps, yet which would baffle the most skilled
painter to imitate, the most skilled poet to describe. Thus, for
instance, there is a peculiar kind of morning by no means uncommon in
Tuscany in what is completely winter, not a remnant of autumn or a
beginning of spring. It is cold, but windless; the sky full of sun, the
earth full of mist. Sun and mist uniting into a pale luminousness in
which all things lose body, become mere outline; bodiless hills taking
shape where they touch the sky with their curve; clear line of irregular
houses, of projecting ilex roundings and pointed cypresses marking the
separation between hill and sky, the one scarcely more solid, corporeal
than the other; the hill almost as blue as the sky, the sky almost as
vaporous as the hill; the tangible often more ghostlike than the
intangible. But the sun has smitten the higher hills, and the vapours
have partially rolled down, in a scarcely visible fold, to their feet;
and the high hill, not yet rock or earth, swells up into the sky as
something real, but fluid and of infinite elasticity. All in front the
plain is white with mist; or pinkish grey with the unseen agglomeration
of bare tree boughs and trunks, of sere field; till, nearer us, the
trees become more visible, the short vinebearing elms in the fields,
interlacing their branches compressed by distance, the clumps of
poplars, so scant and far between from nearly, so serried and compact
from afar; and between them an occasional flush, a tawny vapour of the
orange twigged osiers; and then, still nearer, the expanse of sere
field, of mottled, crushed-together, yellowed grass and