e, shallowed upon the
vast aerial shore, is at last met by the Eternal "Here shall thy waves
be stayed," the glory of its aspect fades into blanched fearfulness; its
purple walls are rent into grisly rocks, its silver fretwork saddened
into wasting snow, the storm-brands of ages are on its breast, the ashes
of its own ruin lie solemnly on its white raiment.

Nor in such instances as these alone, though strangely enough, the
discrepancy between apparent and actual beauty is greater in proportion
to the unapproachableness of the object, is the law observed. For every
distance from the eye there is a peculiar kind of beauty, or a different
system of lines of form; the sight of that beauty is reserved for that
distance, and for that alone. If you approach nearer, that kind of
beauty is lost, and another succeeds, to be disorganised and reduced to
strange and incomprehensible means and appliances in its turn. If you
desire to perceive the great harmonies of the form of a rocky mountain,
you must not ascend upon its sides. All is there disorder and accident,
or seems so; sudden starts of its shattered beds hither and thither;
ugly struggles of unexpected strength from under the ground; fallen
fragments, toppling one over another into more helpless fall. Retire
from it, and, as your eye commands it more and more, as you see the
ruined mountain world with a wider glance, behold! dim sympathies begin
to busy themselves in the disjointed mass; line binds itself into
stealthy fellowship with line; group by group, the helpless fragments
gather themselves into ordered companies; new captains of hosts and
masses of battalions become visible, one by one, and far away answers of
foot to foot, and of bone to bone, until the powerless chaos is seen
risen up with girded loins, and not one piece of all the unregarded heap
could now be spared from the mystic whole.

Sec. XVIII. Now it is indeed true that where nature loses one kind of
beauty, as you approach it, she substitutes another; this is worthy of
her infinite power: and, as we shall see, art can sometimes follow her
even in doing this; but all I insist upon at present is, that the
several effects of nature are each worked with means referred to a
particular distance, and producing their effect at that distance only.
Take a singular and marked instance: When the sun rises behind a ridge
of pines, and those pines are seen from a distance of a mile or two,
against his light, the whole