for my country in coming away from it; but I feel it is
something--something great--something virtuous and heroic. Lofty
emotions rise within me, when I see the sun set on the blue
Mediterranean. I am the limpet on the rock. My father's name is Turner
and my boots are green.

Apropos of blue. In a certain picture, called "The Serenade," you
painted a sky. If you ever have occasion to paint the Mediterranean, let
it be exactly of that colour. It lies before me now, as deeply and
intensely blue. But no such colour is above me. Nothing like it. In the
South of France--at Avignon, at Aix, at Marseilles--I saw deep blue
skies (not _so_ deep though--oh Lord, no!), and also in America; but the
sky above me is familiar to my sight. Is it heresy to say that I have
seen its twin-brother shining through the window of Jack Straw's--that
down in Devonshire I have seen a better sky? I daresay it is; but like a
great many other heresies, it is true.

But such green--green--green--as flutters in the vineyard down below the
windows, _that_ I never saw; nor yet such lilac, and such purple as
float between me and the distant hills; nor yet--in anything--picture,
book, or verbal boredom--such awful, solemn, impenetrable blue, as is
that same sea. It has such an absorbing, silent, deep, profound effect,
that I can't help thinking it suggested the idea of Styx. It looks as if
a draught of it--only so much as you could scoop up on the beach, in the
hollow of your hand--would wash out everything else, and make a great
blue blank of your intellect.

When the sun sets clearly, then, by Heaven, it is majestic! From any one
of eleven windows here, or from a terrace overgrown with grapes, you may
behold the broad sea; villas, houses, mountains, forts, strewn with rose
leaves--strewn with thorns--stifled in thorns! Dyed through and through
and through. For a moment. No more. The sun is impatient and fierce,
like everything else in these parts, and goes down headlong. Run to
fetch your hat--and it's night. Wink at the right time of black
night--and it's morning. Everything is in extremes. There is an insect
here (I forget its name, and Fletcher and Roche are both out) that
chirps all day. There is one outside the window now. The chirp is very
loud, something like a Brobdingnagian grasshopper. The creature is born
to chirp--to progress in chirping--to chirp louder, louder, louder--till
it gives one tremendous chirp, and bursts itself. That is its