... Sunrise: a morning of supernal beauty,--the sky of a fairy
tale,--the sea of a love-poem.
Under a heaven of exquisitely tender blue, the whole smooth sea has a
perfect luminous dove-color,--the horizon being filled to a great height
with greenish-golden haze,--a mist of unspeakably sweet tint, a hue
that, imitated in any aquarelle, would be cried out against as an
impossibility. As yet the hills are nearly all gray, the forests also
inwrapping them are gray and ghostly, for the sun has just risen above
them, and vapors hang like a veil between. Then, over the glassy level
of the flood, bands of purple and violet and pale blue and fluid gold
begin to shoot and quiver and broaden; these are the currents of the
morning, catching varying color with the deepening of the day and the
lifting of the tide.
Then, as the sun rises higher, green masses begin to glimmer among the
grays; the outlines of the forest summits commence to define themselves
through the vapory light, to left and right of the great glow. Only the
city still remains invisible; it lies exactly between us and the
downpour of solar splendor, and the mists there have caught such
radiance that the place seems hidden by a fog of fire. Gradually the
gold-green of the horizon changes to a pure yellow; the hills take soft,
rich, sensuous colors. One of the more remote has turned a marvellous
tone--a seemingly diaphanous aureate color, the very ghost of gold. But
at last all of them sharpen bluely, show bright folds and ribbings of
green through their haze. The valleys remain awhile clouded, as if
filled with something like blue smoke; but the projecting masses of
cliff and slope swiftly change their misty green to a warmer hue. All
these tints and colors have a spectral charm, a preternatural
loveliness; everything seems subdued, softened, semi-vaporized,--the
only very sharply defined silhouettes being those of the little becalmed
ships sprinkling the western water, all spreading colored wings to catch
the morning breeze.
The more the sun ascends, the more rapid the development of the
landscape out of vapory blue; the hills all become green-faced, reveal
the details of frondage. The wind fills the waiting sails--white, red,
yellow,--ripples the water, and turns it green. Little fish begin to
leap; they spring and fall in glittering showers like opalescent blown
spray. And at last, through the fading vapor, dew-glittering red-tiled
roofs reveal themselves: the city is unveiled--a city full of color,
somewhat quaint, somewhat Spanish-looking--a little like St. Pierre, a
little like New Orleans in the old quarter; everywhere fine tall palms.