The hour of low lights, which the painters of the past almost
exclusively reproduced, is naturally that in which we recognise
easiest, not only the identity of mood awakened by the art and by the
country, but the closer resemblance between the things which art was
able to do, and the things which the country had already done. Even
more, immediately after sunset. The hills, becoming uniform masses,
assert their movement, strike deep into the valley, draw themselves
strongly up towards the sky. The valleys also, with their purple
darkness, rising like smoke out of them, assert themselves in their
turn. And the sky, the more diaphanous for all this dark solidity
against it, becomes sky more decisively; takes, moreover, colour which
only fluid things can have; turns into washes of pale gold, of palest
tea-rose pink and beryl green. Against this sky the cypresses are
delicately finished off in fine black lacework, even as in the
background of Botticelli's _Spring_, and Leonardo's or Verrocchio's
_Annuniciation_. One understands that those passionate lovers of line
loved the moment of sunset apart even from colour. The ridges of pines
and cypresses soon remain the only distinguishable thing in the
valleys, pulling themselves (as one feels it) rapidly up, like great
prehistoric shapes of Saurians. Soon the sky only and mountains will
exist. Then begins the time, before the starlit night comes to say its
say, when everything grows drowsy, a little vague, and the blurred
mountains go to sleep in the smoke of dusk. Then only, due west, the
great Carrara peaks stand out against the sanguine sky, long pointed
curves and flame-shaped sudden crests, clear and keen beyond the power
of mortal hand to draw.