There is hardly
any colour except the blue of sky and shadow. Everything is traced in
vanishing tints, passing from the almost amber of the distant sunlight
through glowing white into pale greys and brighter blues and deep
ethereal azure. The pines stand in black platoons upon the hillsides,
with a tinge of red or orange on their sable. Some carry masses of
snow. Others have shaken their plumes free. The chalets are like fairy
houses or toys, waist-deep in stores of winter fuel. With their mellow
tones of madder and umber on the weather-beaten woodwork relieved
against the white, with fantastic icicles and folds of snow depending
from their eaves, or curled like coverlids from roof and window-sill,
they are far more picturesque than in the summer. Colour, wherever it
is found, whether in these cottages or in a block of serpentine by
the roadside, or in the golden bulrush blades by the lake shore, takes
more than double value. It is shed upon the landscape like a spiritual
and transparent veil. Most beautiful of all are the sweeping lines of
pure untroubled snow, fold over fold of undulating softness, billowing
along the skirts of the peaked hills. There is no conveying the
charm of immaterial, aerial, lucid beauty, the feeling of purity and
aloofness from sordid things, conveyed by the fine touch on all our
senses of light, colour, form, and air, and motion, and rare tinkling
sound. The magic is like a spirit mood of Shelley's lyric verse.
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