Above the valley rose lofty mountains, purple and blue in the warm sunlight, range behind range. They rose until they seemed to reach the very sky, the most distant merely faint shadows of picturesque lines and soft dyes of deeper blue than the space above them, a vision of extreme distance and subtile gradation of colour as well as variety in form, as fairy-like and poetic as ever eye could feast upon. There was nothing harsh or monotonous about any portion, either in shape or tint, and the sunlight gleamed over it with a mellow lustre.
The sides of the valley were lined with terraces and gardens, all lavish in their luxuriant freedom. Walls had been reared at parts where wanted to support the soil, but they were toned to the harmonious tint of the cliffs, and in many places covered with trailing vines. The summits of palaces shone above those waving and clustered trees, while walks and steps led down from terrace to terrace by many a wind.
Fountains played in the gardens, the little rivulets from their basins dropping over the cliffs on to the sloping sides of the hill like
"Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn,"
or stealing gently down to join that louder-voiced central stream.
The upper heights swam in a mellow light like the house of the lotus-eaters, purely bright as was the heaven of St John at Patmos, while in the valley rested subdued shadows from sheltered copse, uplifted pine and pillared cypress. It was a valley where the perfection of cultivated Art was wedded to capricious Nature—a landscape without a flaw or false line.
