the Grande Chartreuse subject in the Liber Studiorum,
and consider whether anywhere else in art you can find similar
expressions of the law.

"Well; but you have come to no conclusions in this chapter respecting
the Beauty of Precipices; and that was your professed business with
them."

I am not sure that the idea of beauty was meant in general to be very
strictly connected with such mountain forms: one does not,
instinctively, speak or think of a "Beautiful Precipice." They have,
however, their beauty, and it is infinite; yet so dependent on help or
change from other things, on the way the pines crest them, or the
waterfalls color them, or the clouds isolate them, that I do not choose
to dwell here on any of their perfect aspects, as they cannot be
reasoned of by anticipating inquiries into other materials of landscape.

Thus, I have much to say of the cliffs of Grindelwald and the
Chartreuse, but all so dependent upon certain facts belonging to pine
vegetation, that I am compelled to defer it to the next volume; nor do I
much regret this; because it seems to me that, without any setting
forth, or rather beyond all setting forth, the Alpine precipices have a
fascination about them which is sufficiently felt by the spectator in
general, and even by the artist; only they have not been properly drawn,
because people do not usually attribute the magnificence of their effect
to the trifling details which really are its elements; and, therefore,
in common drawings of Swiss scenery we see all kinds of efforts at
sublimity by exaggeration of the projection of the mass, or by
obscurity, or blueness or aerial tint,--by everything, in fact, except
the one needful thing,--plain drawing of the rock. Therefore in this
chapter I have endeavored to direct the reader to a severe mathematical
estimate of precipice outline, and to make him dwell, not on the
immediately pathetic or impressive aspect of cliffs, which all men feel
readily enough, but on their internal structure. For he may rest assured
that, as the Matterhorn is built of mica flakes, so every great
pictorial impression in scenery of this kind is to be reached by little
and little; the cliff must be built in the picture as it was probably in
reality--inch by inch; and the work will, in the end, have most power
which was begun with most patience. No man is fit to paint Swiss scenery
until he can place himself front to front with one of those mighty
crags, in broad daylight