Save in the lushness of early summer, Tuscany is, on the whole, pale;
a country where the loveliness of colour is that of its luminousness,
and where light is paramount. From this arises, perhaps, the austerity
of its true summer--summer when fields are bare, grass burnt to
delicate cinnamon and russet, and the hills, with their sere herbs and
bushes, seem modelled out of pale rosy or amethyst light; an austerity
for the eye corresponding to a sense of healthfulness given by steady,
intense heat, purged of all damp, pure like the scents of dry leaves,
of warm, cypress resin and of burnt thyme and myrrh of the stony
ravines and stubbly fields. On such August days the plain and the more
distant mountains will sometimes be obliterated, leaving only the
inexpressible suavity of the hills on the same side as the sun, made
of the texture of the sky, lying against it like transparent and still
luminous shadows. All pictures of such effects of climate are false,
even Perugino's and Claude's, because even in these the eye is not
sufficiently attracted and absorbed away from the foreground, from the
earth to the luminous sky. That effect is the most powerful, sweetest,
and most restorative in all nature perhaps; a bath for the soul in
pure light and air. That is the incomparable buoyancy and radiance of
deepest Tuscan summer. But the winter is, perhaps, even more Tuscan
and more austerely beautiful. I am not even speaking of the fact that
the mountains, with their near snows and brooding blue storms and ever
contending currents of wind and battles and migrations of great
clouds, necessarily make much of winter very serious and solemn, as it
sweeps down their ravines and across their ridges. I am thinking of
the serene winter days of mist and sun, with ranges of hills made of a
luminous bluish smoke, and sky only a more luminous and liquid kind,
and the olives but a more solid specimen, of the mysterious silvery
substance of the world. The marvellous part of it all, and quite
impossible to convey, is that such days are not pensive, but
effulgent, that the lines of the landscape are not blurred, but
exquisitely selected and worked.