. The White hills; their legends, landscape, and poetry. broad forehead of theProfile Mountain, kindling its gloomy brows with radiance, and melt-ing the azure of its temples into pale violet; and falhng lower, stain-ing with rose tints the cool mists of the ravines, till the Notch seemsto expand, and the dark and rigid sides of it fall away as they lighten,and recede in soft perspective of buttressed Avail and flushed tower,—and then say whether, to an eye that can never be satiated with the blueof a hyacinth, the purple of a fuschia, and the blush of a rose, the gor-geousness ascribed to the
. The White hills; their legends, landscape, and poetry. broad forehead of theProfile Mountain, kindling its gloomy brows with radiance, and melt-ing the azure of its temples into pale violet; and falhng lower, stain-ing with rose tints the cool mists of the ravines, till the Notch seemsto expand, and the dark and rigid sides of it fall away as they lighten,and recede in soft perspective of buttressed Avail and flushed tower,—and then say whether, to an eye that can never be satiated with the blueof a hyacinth, the purple of a fuschia, and the blush of a rose, the gor-geousness ascribed to the mountains is a mere exercise of rhetoric,or a fiction of the fancy. Or, towards evening of midsummer, atthe same spot, see the great hills assume a deeper blue or purple ;aee the burly Cannon Mountain stand, a dark abutment, at the gate 96 THE WHITE HILLS. of the Notch, unlighted except by its own pallor; and, as the sungoes down, watch his last beams of crimson or orange cover withundevastating fire the pyramidal peaks of the three great Haystacks,. and then decide whether language can recall or report the pomp ofthe spectacle, any more than the cold colors of art can exaggeratewhat the Creator writes there in chaste and glowing flame. Then, as if the earth and sea had beenDissolved into one lake of fire, were seenThose mountains towering, as from waves of flame,Around the vaporous sun, from which there cameThe inmost purple spirit of light, and madeTheir very peaks transparent. Have our readers considered this testimony of Mr. Ruskin ? In THE PEMIGEWASSET VALLEY. 97 some sense, a person who has never seen the rose-color of the rays ofdawn crossing a blue mountain twelve or fifteen miles away, canhardly be said to know what tenderness in color means at all. Brighttenderness he may, indeed, see in the sky or in a flower, but thisgrave tenderness of the far-away hill-purples he cannot conceive. And now with the mountains in our minds eye, from a point sofavorable as Campton f
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, booksubjectwhitemo, bookyear1876
