There, they have heard us! The cap rises off the 'Summer-house
hill,' that eight hundred feet of upright wall, which seems ready to
topple down into the nest of be-myrtled cottages at its foot; and as
we sweep out into the deeper water the last mist-flake streams up
from the Foreland, and vanishes in white threads into the stainless
blue.
'Look at the colours of that Foreland!' cried Claude. 'The simple
monotone of pearly green, broken only at intervals by blood-red
stains, where the turf has slipped and left the fresh rock bare, and
all glimmering softly through a delicate blue haze, like the bloom on
a half-ripened plum!'
'And look, too, how the grey pebble beach is already dancing and
quivering in the mirage which steams up, like the hot breath of a
limekiln, from the drying stones. Talk of "glazings and scumblings,"
ye artists! and bungle at them as you will, what are they to Nature's
own glazings, deepening every instant there behind us?'
'Mock me not. I have walked up and down here with a humbled and
broken spirit, and had nearly forsworn the audacity of painting
anything beyond a beech stem, or a frond of fern.
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