A certain furious river
runs curving down the valley; its pace never varies, it has not a
pool for as far as you can follow it; and its unchanging, senseless
hurry is strangely tedious to witness. It is a river that a man
could grow to hate. Day after day breaks with the rarest gold upon
the mountain spires, and creeps, growing and glowing, down into the
valley. From end to end the snow reverberates the sunshine; from end
to end the air tingles with the light, clear and dry like crystal.
Only along the course of the river, but high above it, there hangs
far into the noon, one waving scarf of vapour. It were hard to fancy
a more engaging feature in a landscape; perhaps it is harder to
believe that delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a
creature of the incontinent stream whose course it follows. By noon
the sky is arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour - mild and pale
and melting in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with an
intensity of purple blue. What with this darkness of heaven and the
intolerable lustre of the snow, space is reduced again to chaos. An
English painter, coming to France late in life, declared with natural
anger that 'the values were all wrong.
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