sources in his love of light. Verona emerges from the gloom of the past
as "a darkness kindling at the core." He sees the "pink perfection of
the cyclamen," the "rose bloom o'er the summit's front of stone." And,
like most painters of the glow of light, he throws a peculiar intensity
into his glooms. When he paints a dark night, as in _Pan and Luna_, the
blackness is a solid jelly-like thing that can be cut. And even night
itself falls short of the pitchy gloom that precedes the Eastern vision,
breaking in despair "against the soul of blackness there," as the gloom
of Saul's tent discovers within it "a something more black than the
blackness," the sustaining tent-pole, and then Saul himself "gigantic
and blackest of all."

[Footnote 64: "I never grow tired of sunrises," he wrote in a letter,
recently published, to Aubrey de Vere, in 1851 (_A. de Vere: A Memoir_,
by Wilfrid Ward).]

[Footnote 65: _Two Poets of Croisic_.]

But mostly the foil is a vivid, even strident, contrast. He sees the
"old June weather" blue above, and the

"great opaque
Blue breadth of sea without a break"

under the walls of the seaside palazzo in Southern Italy, "where the
baked cicala dies of drouth"; and the blue lilies about the harp of
golden-haired David; and Solomon gold-robed in the blue abyss of his
cedar house, "like the centre spike of gold which burns deep in the
blue-bell's womb";[66] and the "gaze of Apollo" through the gloom of
Verona woods;[67] he sees the American pampas--"miles and miles of gold