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 faraway 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 the 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, 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.
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