capital description. "I address you, my friend," he
wrote, "with something of the lofty spirit of an exile, a banished
commoner, a sort of Anglo-Pole. I don't exactly know what I have done
for my country in coming away from it, but I feel it is something;
something great; something virtuous and heroic. Lofty emotions rise
within me, when I see the sun set on the blue Mediterranean. I am the
limpet on the rock. My father's name is Turner, and my boots are
green. . . . Apropos of blue. In a certain picture called the Serenade for
which Browning wrote that verse[81] in Lincoln's-inn-fields, you, O Mac,
painted a sky. If you ever have occasion to paint the Mediterranean, let
it be exactly of that colour. It lies before me now, as deeply and
intensely blue. But no such colour is above me. Nothing like it. In the
south of France, at Avignon, at Aix, at Marseilles, I saw deep blue
skies; and also in America. But the sky above me is familiar to my
sight. Is it heresy to say that I have seen its twin brother shining
through the window of Jack Straw's--that down in Devonshire-terrace I
have seen a better sky? I dare say it is; but like a great many other
heresies, it is true. . . . But such green, green, green, as flutters in
the vineyard down below the windows, _that_ I never saw; nor yet such
lilac and such purple as float between me and the distant hills; nor yet
in anything, picture, book, or vestal boredom, such awful, solemn,
impenetrable blue, as in that same sea. It has such an absorbing,
silent, deep, profound effect, that I can't help thinking it suggested
the idea of Styx. It looks as if a draught of it, only so much as you
could scoop up on the beach in the hollow of your hand, would wash out
everything else, and make a great blue blank of your intellect. . . . When
the sun sets clearly, then, by Heaven, it is majestic. From any one of
eleven windows here, or from a terrace overgrown with grapes, you may
behold the broad sea, villas, houses, mountains, forts, strewn with rose
leaves. Strewn with them? Steeped in them! Dyed, through and through and
through. For a moment. No more. The sun is impatient and fierce (like
everything else in these parts), and goes down headlong. Run to fetch
your hat--and it's night. Wink at the right time of black night--and
it's morning. Everything is in extremes. There is an insect here that
chirps all day. There is one outside the window now. The chirp is very
loud: something like a Brobd