ain; beneath _it_--low-fallen mica flake!--the snowy hills
should lie bowed like flocks of sheep, and the kingdoms of the earth
fade away in unregarded blue; and around it--weak, wave-drifted mica
flake!--the great war of the firmament should burst in thunder, and yet
stir it not; and the fiery arrows and angry meteors of the night fall
blunted back from it into the air; and all the stars in the clear heaven
should light, one by one as they rose, new cressets upon the points of
snow that fringed its abiding-place on the imperishable spire?

Sec. 18. I have thought it worth while, for the sake of these lessons, and
the other interests connected with them, to lead the reader thus far
into the examination of the principal precipices among the Alps,
although, so far as our immediate purposes are concerned, the inquiry
cannot be very fruitful or helpful to us. For rocks of this kind, being
found only in the midst of the higher snow fields, are not only out of
the general track of the landscape painter, but are for the most part
quite beyond his power--even beyond Turner's. The waves of snow, when it
becomes a principal element in mountain form, are at once so subtle in
tone, and so complicated in curve and fold, that no skill will express
them, so as to keep the whole luminous mass in anything like a true
relation to the rock darkness. For the distant rocks of the upper peaks
are themselves, when in light, paler than white paper, and their true
size and relation to near objects cannot be exhibited unless they are
painted in the palest tones. Yet, as compared with their snow, they are
so dark that a daguerreotype taken for the proper number of seconds to
draw the snow shadows rightly, will always represent the rocks as
_coal-black_. In order, therefore, to paint a snowy mountain properly,
we should need a light as much brighter than white paper as white paper
is brighter than charcoal. So that although it is possible, with deep
blue sky, and purple rocks, and blue shadows, to obtain a very
interesting resemblance of snow effect, and a true one up to a certain
point (as in the best examples of the body-color drawings sold so
extensively in Switzerland) it is not possible to obtain any of those
refinements of form and gradation which a great artist's eye requires.
Turner felt that, among these highest hills, no serious or perfect work
could be done; and although in one or two of his vignettes (already
referred to in the first vo