close to
Atlas), golden apples and all,--I would give away in an instant, for
one mossy granite stone a foot broad, and two leaves of lady-fern.[24]

I know that this is in great part idiosyncrasy; and that I must not
trust to my own feelings, in this respect, as representative of the
modern landscape instinct: yet I know it is not idiosyncrasy, in so
far as there may be proved to be indeed an increase of the absolute
beauty of all scenery in exact proportion to its mountainous
character, providing that character be _healthily_ mountainous. I do
not mean to take the Col de Bonhomme as representative of hills, any
more than I would take Romney Marsh as representative of plains; but
putting Leicestershire or Staffordshire fairly beside Westmoreland,
and Lombardy or Champagne fairly beside the Pays de Vaud or the Canton
Berne, I find the increase in the calculable sum of elements of beauty
to be steadily in proportion to the increase of mountainous character;
and that the best image which the world can give of Paradise is in the
slope of the meadows, orchards, and corn-fields on the sides of a
great Alp, with its purple rocks and eternal snows above; this
excellence not being in any wise a matter referable to feeling, or
individual preferences, but demonstrable by calm enumeration of the
number of lovely colours on the rocks, the varied grouping of the
trees, and quantity of noble incidents in stream, crag, or cloud,
presented to the eye at any given moment.

For consider, first, the difference produced in the whole tone of
landscape colour by the introductions of purple, violet, and deep
ultramarine blue, which we owe to mountains. In an ordinary lowland
landscape we have the blue of the sky; the green of grass, which I
will suppose (and this is an unnecessary concession to the lowlands)
entirely fresh and bright; the green of trees; and certain elements of
purple, far more rich and beautiful than we generally should think, in
their bark and shadows (bare hedges and thickets, or tops of trees, in
subdued afternoon sunshine, are nearly perfect purple, and of an
exquisite tone), as well as in ploughed fields, and dark ground in
general. But among mountains, in _addition_ to all this, large
unbroken spaces of pure violet and purple are introduced in their
distances; and even near, by films of cloud passing over the darkness
of ravines or forests, blues are produced of the most subtle
tenderness; these azures and purples[2