through the last fragments of rain-cloud in
deep, palpitating azure, half aether half dew. The noonday sun came
slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia, and its masses of
entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the
wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with
rain. I cannot call it colour, it was conflagration. Purple, and
crimson, and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle, the
rejoicing trees sank into the valley in showers of light, every
separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life; each, as it
turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then
an emerald. Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas
arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with
the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks for foam, and _silver_
flakes of _orange_ spray tossed into the air around them, breaking
over the grey walls of rock into a thousand separate stars, fading and
kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every
glade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven, opening in
sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as sheet
lightning opens in a cloud at sunset; the motionless masses of dark
rock--dark though flushed with scarlet lichen--casting their quiet
shadows across its restless radiance, the fountain underneath them
filling its marble hollow with blue mist and fitful sound, and over
all--the multitudinous bars of amber and rose, the _sacred_ clouds
that have no _darkness_, and only exist to illumine, were seen in
fathomless intervals between the solemn and _orbed_ repose of the
stone pines, passing to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding
lustre of the measureless line where the Campagna melted into the
blaze of the sea." In verity, this is no "Campana Supellex." It is a
riddle! Is he going up or down hill--or both at once? No human being
can tell. He did not like the "sulphur and treacle" of "our Scotch
connoisseurs;" but what colours has he not added here to his
sulphur--colours, too, that we fear for the "idea of truth" cannot
coexist! And how, in the name of optics, could it be possible for any
painter to take in all this, with the "_fathomless intervals_," into
an angle of vision of forty-five degrees? It is quite superfluous to
ask "who is likest this, Turner or Poussin?" There immediately follows
a remark upon another picture in the National Gallery, t