DECORATION XXI. TREATMENT OF ORNAMENT 295

helpless fragments gather themselves into ordered companies; new captains of hosts and masses of battalions become visible, one by one, and far away answers of foot to foot, and of bone to bone, until the powerless chaos is seen risen up with girded loins, and not one piece of all the unregarded heap could now be spared from the mystic whole.

§ 18. Now it is indeed true that where nature loses one kind of beauty, as you approach it, she substitutes another; this is worthy of her infinite power: and, as we shall see, art can sometimes follow her even in doing this; but all I insist upon at present is, that the several effects of nature are each worked with means referred to a particular distance, and producing their effect at that distance only. Take a singular and marked instance: When the sun rises behind a ridge of pines, and those pines are seen from a distance of a mile or two, against his light, the whole form of the tree, trunk, branches, and all, becomes one frostwork of intensely brilliant silver, which is relieved against the clear sky like a burning fringe, for some distance on either side of the sun.* Now suppose that a person who had never seen pines were, for the first time in his life, to see them under this strange aspect, and, reasoning as to the means by which such effect could be produced, laboriously to approach the eastern ridge, how would he be amazed to find that the fiery spectres had been produced by trees with swarthy and grey trunks, and dark green leaves! We, in our simplicity,

* Shakspeare and Wordsworth (I think they only) have noticed this. Shakspeare, in Richard II.:-

“But when, from under this terrestrial ball,

He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines.”

And Wordsworth, in one of his minor poems on leaving Italy:-

“My thoughts become bright like yon edging of pines

On the steep’s lofty verge-how it blackened the air!

But, touched from behind by the sun, it now shines

With threads that seem part of his own silver hair.”¹

¹ [The passage from Richard II. is in Act iii., scene 2; that from Wordsworth in Memorials of a Tour on the Continent (1820), xxix., “Stanzas composed in the Simplon Pass.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]