and throat, he painted so dexterously.

And when people are happy in this thirsty land water will not be far
off; and in the school of Giorgione, the presence of water--the well, or
marble-rimmed pool, the drawing or pouring of water, as the woman pours
it from a pitcher with her jewelled hand in the Fete Champetre,
listening, perhaps, to the cool sound as it falls, blent with the music
of the pipes--is as characteristic, and almost as suggestive, as that of
music itself. And the landscape feels, and is glad of it also--a
landscape full of clearness, of the effects of water, of fresh rain
newly passed through the air, and collected into the grassy channels;
the air, too, in the school of Giorgione, seeming as vivid as the people
who breathe it, and literally empyrean, all impurities being burnt out
of it, and no taint, no floating particle of anything but its own proper
elements allowed to subsist within it.

Its scenery is such as in England we call "park scenery," with some
elusive refinement felt about the rustic buildings, the choice grass,
the grouped trees, the undulations deftly economised for graceful
effect. Only, in Italy all natural things are, as it were, woven through
and through with gold thread, even the cypress revealing it among the
folds of its blackness. And it is with gold dust, or gold thread, that
these Venetian painters seem to work, spinning its fine filaments,
through the solemn human flesh, away into the white plastered walls of
the thatched huts. The harsher details of the mountains recede to a
harmonious distance, the one peak of rich blue above the horizon
remaining but as the visible warrant of that due coolness which is all
we need ask here of the Alps, with their dark rains and streams. Yet
what real, airy space, as the eye passes from level to level, through
the long-drawn valley in which Jacob embraces Rachel among the flocks!
Nowhere is there a truer instance of that balance, that modulated unison
of landscape and persons--of the human image and its
accessories--already noticed as characteristic of the Venetian school,
so that, in it, neither personage nor scenery is ever a mere pretext for
the other.

Something like this seems to me to be the vraie verite about Giorgione,
if I may adopt a serviceable expression, by which the French recognise
those more liberal and durable impressions which, in respect of any
really considerable person or subject, anything that has at all
intricate