variable pleasant light out
of the sky. Nay, the ugly gutter, that stagnates over the drain-bars in
the heart of the foul city, is not altogether base; down in that, if you
will look deep enough, you may see the dark serious blue of far-off sky,
and the passing of pure clouds. It is at your own will that you see in
that despised stream either the refuse of the street, or the image of
the sky. So it is with almost all other things that we unkindly despise.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 71: From "Modern Painters," Vol. I, Pt. II, Sec. V, Chapter
I.]

C. THE MOUNTAIN GLORY[72]

The best image which the world can give of Paradise is in the slope of
the meadows, orchards, and corn-fields on the sides of a great Alp, with
its purple rocks and eternal snows above; this excellence not being in
any wise a matter referable to feeling, or individual preferences, but
demonstrable by calm enumeration of the number of lovely colours on the
rocks, the varied grouping of the trees, and quantity of noble incidents
in stream, crag, or cloud, presented to the eye at any given moment.

For consider, first, the difference produced in the whole tone of
landscape colour by the introductions of purple, violet, and deep
ultramarine blue, which we owe to mountains. In an ordinary lowland
landscape we have the blue of the sky; the green of 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