“The Heart of the Andes”/Part 3

The blue sky is the first region of the picture for our study. Unless a landscape conveys a feeling of the infinite, it is not good for immortals. This sky is no brazen canopy, no lustrous burnished screen, no opaque turquoise surface. It is pure, penetrable, lucent in every tremulous atom of its substance, and as the eye pierces its depths, it feels the same vital quiver thrilling through a boundless calm. Without an atmosphere of joy, earthly triumphs and splendid successes are naught. As fully is pure sky a necessary condition of delight in the glories of Nature. Could that divine presence of the snow-peak dwell in regions less clear and radiant than those we are viewing? Blue sky melting into a warmer glow overhangs, surrounds, tenderly enfolds, and rests upon the mountain’s golden crown and silvery-shadowed heights. No blank wall thrusts us back as we seek an egress from the picture, but blue sky clinging and closing about our way leads us on, sphere after sphere into the infinite.

A few motionless cirri lie like wreaths of foam flung together by meeting ripples on this aerial ocean. Pellucid creatures of air are they, dwelling in mid ether from which they came and into which they will presently be transfigured after moments of brilliant incarnation. They seem emanations from the mountain, a film of its own substance, light snow-drifts whirled up into the blue. Their spiritual flakes lift the peak and intensify the hue of the sky. Their white upon the azure is as delicate as the mingling of erect white blossoms and violet-blue wreaths of flowers in the right-hand foreground, which in fact recalls and is a memorial of them. Of the other clouds I will speak as I come to their proper aerial region in the picture.