fiefoe

'Please God, I had become southern and took beauty for granted.'

A hint or memory of gracious things ran in the slight breeze.
The mountains all around had lost their mouldings, and were marked in flat silhouettes against the sky. The new lake which had just appeared below me was bright as water is at dusk.
The air was instinct with heat.
There were sharp white clouds on the far northern horizon, low down above the uncertain edge of the world. I looked again and found they did not move. Then I knew they were the Alps.
There, without any warning of colours, or of the heraldry that we have in the north, the sky was a great field of pure light, and without doubt it was all woven through, as was my mind watching it, with security and gladness. Into this field, as I watched it, rose the sun.
It is a great sheet like a sea;... Indeed it was an impression of silence and recollection, for the water lay all upturned to heaven, and, in the sky above me, the moon at her quarter hung still pale in the daylight, waiting for glory.
There - high, jagged, rapt into the sky - stood such a group of mountains as men dream of in good dreams, or see in the works of painters when old age permits them revelations. Their... outline was tumultuous, yet balanced; full of accident and poise. It was as though these high walls of Carrara,... had been shaped expressly for man, in order to exalt him with unexpected and fantastic shapes, and to expand his dull life with a permanent surprise.

"The Path to Rome"