mountains.

Now, whenever these vast peaks, rising from 12,000 to 24,000 feet above
the sea, form part of anything like a landscape, that is to say,
whenever the spectator beholds them from the region of vegetation, or
even from any distance at which it is possible to get something like a
view of their whole mass, they must be at so great a distance from him
as to become aerial and faint in all their details. Their summits, and
all those higher masses of whose character we have been speaking, can by
no possibility be nearer to him than twelve or fifteen miles; to
approach them nearer he must climb--must leave the region of vegetation,
and must confine his view to a part, and that a very limited one, of the
mountain he is ascending. Whenever, therefore, these mountains are seen
over anything like vegetation, or are seen in mass, they _must_ be in
the far distance. Most artists would treat an horizon fifteen miles off
very much as if it were mere air; and though the greater clearness of
the upper air permits the high summits to be seen with extraordinary
distinctness, yet they never can by any possibility have dark or deep
shadows, or intense dark relief against a light. Clear they may be, but
faint they must be, and their great and prevailing characteristic, as
distinguished from other mountains, is want of apparent solidity. They
rise in the morning light rather like sharp shades, cast up into the
sky, than solid earth. Their lights are pure, roseate, and
cloud-like--their shadows transparent, pale, and opalescent, and often
indistinguishable from the air around them, so that the mountain-top is
seen in the heaven only by its flakes of motionless fire.

Sec. 7. Total want of any rendering of their phenomena in ancient art.

Now, let me once more ask, though I am sufficiently tired of asking,
what record have we of anything like this in the works of the old
masters? There is no vestige in any existing picture of the slightest
effort to represent the high hill ranges; and as for such drawing of
their forms as we have found in Turner, we might as well look for them
among the Chinese. Very possibly it may be all quite right,--very
probably these men showed the most cultivated taste, the most unerring
judgment, in filling their pictures with mole-hills and sand-heaps. Very
probably the withered and poisonous banks of Avernus, and the sand and
cinders of the Campagna, are much more sublime things than the Alps; but