5] passing into rose-colour of
otherwise wholly unattainable delicacy among the upper summits, the
blue of the sky being at the same time purer and deeper than in the
plains. Nay, in some sense, a person who has never seen the
rose-colour of the rays of dawn crossing a blue mountain twelve or
fifteen miles away, can hardly be said to know what _tenderness_ in
colour means at all; _bright_ tenderness he may, indeed, see in the
sky or in a flower, but this grave tenderness of the far-away
hill-purples he cannot conceive.

Together with this great source of pre-eminence in _mass_ of colour,
we have to estimate the influence of the finished inlaying and
enamel-work of the colour-jewellery on every stone; and that of the
continual variety in species of flower; most of the mountain flowers
being, besides, separately lovelier than the lowland ones. The wood
hyacinth and wild rose are, indeed, the only _supreme_ flowers that
the lowlands can generally show; and the wild rose is also a
mountaineer, and more fragrant in the hills, while the wood hyacinth,
or grape hyacinth, at its best cannot match even the dark
bell-gentian, leaving the light-blue star-gentian in its uncontested
queenliness, and the Alpine rose and Highland heather wholly without
similitude. The violet, lily of the valley, crocus, and wood anemone
are, I suppose, claimable partly by the plains as well as the hills;
but the large orange lily and narcissus I have never seen but on hill
pastures, and the exquisite oxalisis pre-eminently a mountaineer.[26]

To this supremacy in mosses and flowers we have next to add an
inestimable gain in the continual presence and power of water. Neither
in its clearness, its colour, its fantasy of motion, its calmness of
space, depth, and reflection, or its wrath, can water be conceived by
a lowlander, out of sight of sea. A sea wave is far grander than any
torrent--but of the sea and its influences we are not now speaking;
and the sea itself, though it _can_ be clear, is never calm, among our
shores, in the sense that a mountain lake can be calm. The sea seems
only to pause; the mountain lake to sleep, and to dream. Out of sight
of the ocean a lowlander cannot be considered ever to have seen water
at all. The mantling of the pools in the rock shadows, with the golden
flakes of light sinking down through them like falling leaves, the
ringing of the thin currents among the shallows, the flash and the
cloud of the cascade, the ear