for petty places. Sentimental art demands ruins, and strives to “make old baseness picturesque.” But the magnificence of Nature here can be felt without aid from the past. Historic drapery is not needed. Absolute beauty can be loved at first sight. To think our noblest thoughts, we go away from relics to solitude, to God, and to the future.
There is poetic propriety, therefore, in this undisturbing village sanctified by its shrine of faith. Men have not forgotten their conception of God at the Heart of the Andes, — the heart of the heart of the world, where its pulses beat hottest and strongest. And the Artist sets up his own symbol of faith in the church and the foreground cross, and recognizes here that religion whose civilization alone makes such a picture as his possible. A pleasant hamlet is this, with its reed-thatched huts, — here where life is so easy and goes a-Maying all its days.
Divine repose was expressed by the Dome; manly energy by the Cordillera. And now we welcome a graceful feminine element. Water is the fair stranger we are now to greet. We have been all the while aware of her brilliant presence; and have not rarely wandered away from the rough hills to be refreshed by rainbow showers, and stirred with a sense of dancing motion. Now we may give ourselves fully to the river’s bright influence. Forth from a sunlit spot it comes, as unexpected as if we had not seen its placid delay
