nstinct; yet I know it is not idiosyncrasy, in so far
as there may be proved to be indeed an increase of the absolute beauty
of all scenery in exact proportion to its mountainous character,
providing that character be _healthily_ mountainous. I do not mean to
take the Col de Bon Homme as representative of hills, any more than I
would take Romney Marsh as representative of plains; but putting
Leicestershire or Staffordshire fairly beside Westmoreland, and Lombardy
or Champagne fairly beside the Pays de Vaud or the Canton Berne, I find
the increase in the calculable sum of elements of beauty to be steadily
in proportion to the increase of mountainous character; and that 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 colors 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.

Sec. 4. For consider, first, the difference produced in the whole tone of
landscape color 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[107] passing into rose-color 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-color of the rays of dawn crossing a blue
mountain twelve or fifteen