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
passing into rose-colour 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-colour of the rays of dawn crossing a blue mountain twelve
or fifteen miles away, can hardly be said to know what _tenderness_ in
colour means at all; _bright_ tenderness he may, indeed, see in the sky
or in a flower, but this grave tenderness of the faraway hill-purples he
cannot conceive.

Together with this great source of pre-eminence in _mass_ of colour, we
have to estimate the influence of the finished inlaying and enamel-work
of the colour-jewellery on every stone; and that of the continual
variety in species of flower; most of the mountain flowers being,
besides, separately lovelier than the lowland ones. The wood hyacinth
and the wild rose are, indeed, the only _supreme_ flowers that the
lowlands can generally show; and the wild rose is also a mountaineer,
and more fragrant in the hills, while the wood hyacinth, at its best,
cannot match even the dark bell-gentian, leaving the light-blue
star-gentian in its uncontested queenliness, and the Alpine rose and