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The grasses and herbs were green; here and there an almond tree was in blossom. The dark cypresses of Hadrian's Villa stood like spires of thunder clouds against the wonderful azures of this uplifting sky. Before us were the mountains, pine-clad, vineyard-clad; and far up the gleam of a cascade shone like a bent sword in the sun.
It seemed to draw to itself the light, sending it back with gleamings of the gray-blue of the star sapphire, with pellucid azures and lazulis like clouded jades, with glistening peacock iridescences and tender, milky greens of tropic shallows. Little turrets globular and topaz, yellow and pierced with tiny hexagonal openings clustered about it like baby bubbles just nestling down to rest.
She made a brave figure in the flood of sunlight that poured through the gules and azures of the long blazoned windows, her tall, lissome figure clad in a close-fitting robe of black velvet, her abundant glossy black hair rolled back under its white coif, her black eyes and scarlet lips detaching from the ivory of her face, in which no trace of emotion showed, for all the anxiety that consumed her.
But among mountains, in addition to all this, large unbroken spaces of pure violet and purple are introduced in their distances; and even near, by films of cloud passing over the darkness of ravines or forests, blues are produced of the most subtle tenderness; these azures and purples passing into rose-colour of otherwise wholly unattainable delicacy among the upper summits, the blue of the sky being at the same time purer and deeper than in the plains.
For below the daffodils there was a carpet of dark violets, so dim and close that it was their scent first bewrayed them; and as Laura lay gathering with her face among the flowers, she could see behind their gold, and between the hazel stems, the light-filled greys and azures of the mountain distance.
And at once, by a mere turn of the eyes, from the almost crude insistence of the bright primary color of life, you faced the tenuous azures of distance, the delicate mauves and amethysts, the lilacs and saffrons of the arid country. This was the wonder we never tired of seeing for ourselves, of showing to others.
When the harmony of the coloring of a picture, especially in a branch of art in which color goes for so much, has been duly considered and determined on, it would not do to have that which was intended for a scarlet robe turning out a crimson one, nor a brilliant emerald-green changed to a bottle-green, nor, even yet more fatal, the delicate azures and lilacs and grays of a distant landscape changed to comparative opacity, or indeed altered by the shadow of a half-tint from that which the artist's eye has designed for them.
When the whitewash was scraped off, after the removal of the altar-piece in 1825, this wall was found to have been enriched with elaborate decorative paintings "of birds and beasts, fleurs-de-lis, lilies, crescents, stars, scroll foliage, fleury crosses, lace work borders, etc., arranged in most beautiful order and finely contrasted in colours, which consist of the brightest crimsons, purples, azures, greens, etc."
We were accustomed, two or three friends and I, to walk every Thursday to the Saleve, Lamartine's Saleve aux flancs azures; we dined there, and did not return till nightfall." They were days devoted to debauches platoniciennes, to "the free exchange of ideas, the free play of fancy and of gayety.
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