heaven, with one hand, though they may sometimes seem to gather dust and ashes with the other. And, in the last place, it will be found that so surely as a painter is irreligious, thoughtless, or obscene in disposition, so surely is his coloring cold, gloomy, and valueless. The opposite poles of art in this respect are Fra Angelico and Salvator Rosa; of whom the one was a man who smiled seldom, wept often, prayed constantly, and never harbored an impure thought. His pictures are simply so many pieces of jewelry, the colors of the draperies being perfectly pure, as various as those of a painted window, chastened only by paleness, and relieved upon a gold ground. Salvator was a dissipated jester and satirist, a man who spent his life in masking and revelry. But his pictures are full of horror, and their color is for the most part gloomy-gray. Truly, it would seem as if art had so much of eternity in it, that it must take its dye from the close rather than the course of life. In such laughter the heart of man is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness.'

"These are no singular instances. I know no law more severely without exception than this of the connection of pure color with profound and noble thought. The late Flemish pictures, shallow in conception and obscure in subject, are always sombre in color. But the early religious painting of the Flemings is as brilliant in hue as it is holy in thought. The Bellinis, Francias, Peruginos painted in crimson, and blue, and gold. The Caraccis, Guidos, and Rembrandts, in brown and gray. The builders of our great cathedrals veiled their casements, and wrapped their pillars with one robe of purple splendor. The builders of the luxurious Renaissance left their palaces filled only with cold, white light, and in the paleness of their native stone."

The inexperienced eye has no conception of the affluent delight that is kindled by the opulence of pure and tender colors on the mountains. A ramble by the banks of the Saco in North Conway, or along the Androscoggin below Gorham, will often yield from this cause what we may soberly call rapture of vision. A great many

persons, in looking around from Artist's Hill, would say at first that green and blue and white and gray, in the foliage, the grass, the sky, the clouds, and the mountains, were the only colors to be noticed, and these in wide, severely contrasted masses. We should go entirely beyond their appreciation in speaking of the light brown and olive plateaus rising from the wide flats of meadow green, the richer and more subtle hues on the darker belt of lower hills, the sheeny spaces of pure sunshine upon smooth slopes or level sward, the glimmer of pearly radiance upon pools of aerial sapphire brought from the distant mountains in the wandering Saco, the blue and white mistiness from clouds and distant air gleaming in the chasms of brooks fresh from the cool top of Kiarsarge, and the gold or silver glances of light upon knolls or smooth boulders scattered here and there upon the irregular and tawny ground, and upon the house-roofs beyond. Yet let a man who thinks these particulars are imaginary hold his head down, and thus reverse his eyes, and then say whether the delicacy and variety of hues are exaggerated in such a statement. There are those who have such perception of colors with their eyes upright. And they will know that the tints just noted are only hints of a great color-symphony to be wrought out upon the wide landscape. They know how the rich or sombre passages of shade, and the olive strips and slaty breadths of darkness will be transformed in some glorious afternoon, when the landscape assumes its full pomp, into masses of more etherial gloom, and made magnificent by the intermixture of gorgeous tones of purples, emeralds and russets with cloudy azure and subtle gray along the second part of the mountain outworks. They know how those flecks of pearl and sapphire upon the meadow will mingle and spread with shifting azure and amethyst upon the lower parts of the great mountains; and how the spaces of sunshine, the blue and white mistiness, and the golden and silver glances of light, will assume new beauty and larger proportions amid the gleaming hues of the looming azure ridge, the waving gray and purple of cloud-enwrapped peak, the tender flashes of changeful light and tint in sky and cloud, and the tremulous violet and aerial orange of the myste

rious ravines, with their wondrous sloping arras, on whose striped folds, inwrought with gold and silver upon pale emerald ground, are, one might think, the mystical signs of some weird powers that work from within the earth.

But those who cannot detect this range and harmony of hues upon a complicated landscape like that seen from Artist's Hill, have no doubt noticed and enjoyed the simpler and stronger contrasts revealed upon one or two features of such a scene. They have watched, perhaps, the shadow of a wandering cloud thrown over a towering mountain a few miles off, and covering it with a dusk that conceals all its variety of form, as if a purple mantle had been suddenly cast upon it; and they remember how splendidly it made the sparkling gladness of the waters contrast with its undisturbed breadth of gloom. They have rejoiced, when the shadow passed, in seeing the soft, cloudy blue show here and there flakes and lines of tender green and russet and pale orange, that just hint peaks and ridges, which in another change of light may fill the mountain surface with many purple tents tipped and edged with gold. They know how grand is the effect upon the mountains, when there are only a few broken lines of dim light near their tops to show the depth of the shade that drapes them—as though they were themselves darker shadows of soaring earth transformed to cloud! Or possibly their memory reports to them how, in the rich light of evening, a great pyramid will stand up, as we have sometimes seen the charming Mount Madison, draped in a gorgeous tunic whose warp seemed to be aerial sapphire overshot with threads of gold. And they can understand that the visitor is still more fortunate who has an evening provided for him when the light is clear, but interrupted by struggling masses of bright cumuli. Ah, how the light breaking through the shifting openings brings out a continual succession of scenic effects! The clouds break and pass, and the sunshine and shadows ever changing place, reveal, each instant, along the mountain sides, new wonders of soaring ridge, jutting crags delicately veined, and rounded slopes declining to pale depths of winding

ravines, down whose shadowed sides crinkle the narrow, silvery lines of the landslides, like faint lightning in far-off clouds. The next instant, perhaps, the clouds, closing together, leave a monotonous breadth of purple darkness over all. And then, drifting irregularly apart, they open the opportunity for a sunbeam to slip through upon the broad fields of cold shadow. And like a brand of white flame, it hastens to kindle a running fire which consumes the darkness, mantles over the sloping terraces and flashing pinnacles, and leaves a magnificent symbol of the "Allegro" of Milton, where a moment before "Il Penseroso" was suggested by the stately gloom.

The spectacles that, in some rare week of summer, are shown within the compass of a score of hours in one of the White Mountain valleys, interpret for us the passage of our great poet: "How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams." And we cannot better close these pages on the privilege of sight in a village like North Conway than with another charming passage by Mr. Emerson which he kindly con sented to extract for us from a manuscript lecture. "The world is not made up to the eye of figures, that is only half; it is also made of color. How that mysterious element washes the universe with its enchanting waves! The sculptor had ended his work,-and behold! a new world of dream-like glory. This is the last stroke of nature;-beyond color we cannot go. In like manner, life is made up not of knowledge only, but of love also. If thought is form, sentiment is color. It clothes the poor skeleton world with space, variety, and glow. The hues of sunset make life great and romantic to a wretch; so the affections make some pretty web of cottage and fireside details bright, populous, important, and claiming the high place in our history."