Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/103

 is itself shrouded in no mystery. In England, a distance of twenty or thirty miles is enough to impart to mountain ranges the pictorial charms of many delicate tints, and these always changing; and to give even to objects less remote a sort of unreality, grateful to the eye of the poet and the painter. But it is not so in Palestine, where, under ordinary conditions of the heavens, a range of hills, which may be forty or fifty miles distant, shows itself to be—what it is, and nothing more! Illusions of the atmosphere do not lend the distance any unreal charms.

Bring together from the stores of our modern English Poetry those passages which borrow their rich colouring from our fitful atmosphere and its humidity:—the soft and golden glozings of sunrise and sunset, and the pearly distances at noon, and the outbursts of sunbeam, and the sudden overshadowings, and the blendings of tints upon all distances of two or three miles: it is these atmospheric illusions, characteristic of a climate that is humid, and yet warm, which have given to the English taste in landscape its peculiarity, and which shows itself equally in the national poetry, and landscape-painting. That sense of the picturesque, which is so eminently English, must, in part, at least, be traced to those aerial illusions which we willingly admit, as compensation for the discomforts of a variable climate.

If the English temper be moody, and if its tastes