He explained the
obscure light of the unilluminated part of the moon, knew that the sea
had once covered the mountains which contain shells, and the gathering
of the equatorial waters above the polar.
He who thus penetrated into the most secret parts of nature preferred
always the more to the less remote, what, seeming exceptional, was an
instance of law more refined, the construction about things of a
peculiar atmosphere and mixed lights. He paints flowers with such
curious felicity that different writers have attributed to him a
fondness for particular flowers, as Clement the cyclamen, and Rio the
jasmin; while, at Venice, there is a stray leaf from his portfolio
dotted all over with studies of violets and the wild rose. In him first
appears the taste for what is bizarre or recherche in landscape; hollow
places full of the green shadow of bituminous rocks, ridged reefs of
trap-rock which cut the water into quaint sheets of light--their exact
antitype is in our own western seas; all the solemn effects of moving
water; you may follow it springing from its distant source among the
rocks on the heath of the Madonna of the Balances, passing, as a little
fall, into the treacherous calm of the Madonna of the Lake, next, as a
goodly river, below the cliffs of the Madonna of the Rocks, washing the
white walls of its distant villages, stealing out in a network of
divided streams in La Gioconda to the seashore of the Saint Anne--that
delicate place, where the wind passes like the hand of some fine etcher
over the surface, and the untorn shells are lying thick upon the sand,
and the tops of the rocks, to which the waves never rise, are green with
grass, grown fine as hair.
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