There,
mingled with the taller gentians and the white narcissus, the grass
grows deep and free; and as you follow the winding mountain paths,
beneath arching boughs all veiled and dim with blossom--paths that
forever droop and rise over the green banks and mounds sweeping down in
scented undulation, steep to the blue water, studded here and there with
new-mown heaps, filling the air with fainter sweetness--look up toward
the higher hills, where the waves of everlasting green roll silently
into their long inlets among the shadows of the pines."
Claude's landscape is not Swiss, but if it were it would awaken in the
beholder a very similar sensation to that aroused in the reader of this
famous passage. Claude indeed painted landscape in precisely this way.
He was perhaps the first--though priority in such matters is trivial
beside pre-eminence--who painted _effects_ instead of _things_. Light
and air were his material, not ponds and rocks and clouds and trees and
stretches of plain and mountain outlines. He first generalized the
phenomena of inanimate nature, and in this he remains still unsurpassed.
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