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Show 128. achieved freedom of eye, his views, taken consecutively along with the experience which informed them, would produce something more than the artists' mechanical structures made up of foregrounds, middlegrounds, and backgrounds. So the first day of his excursion was filled with foregrounds, the "painted meadows, late-blooming gardens, peaks of rare architecture." When, on the second day, he encountered a "massive picture," he was entering the pure wilderness, "Only the one sublime mountain in sight, the one glacier, and one lake; the whole vailed with one blue shadow - rock, ice and water, without a single leaf." He had passed out of the foreground and into the middleground. Later that day, clinging to the North Face of Ritter, he was lost in the background. So he hoped his progress through the landscape gave the mountains a significance beyond that which artists could achieve. When he finally reached the summit of Ritter, he could look around and appreciate the harmony of the scene, when looking for the first time from an all-embracing standpoint like this, the inexperienced observer is oppressed by the incomprehensible grandeur of the peaks, and it is only after they have been studied one by one, long and lovingly, that their far-reaching harmonies become manifest. Then, penetrate the wilderness where you may, the main telling features to which all the topography is subordinate are quickly perceived, and the most ungovernable Alp-clusters stand revealed, regularly fashioned, and grouped like works of art, - eloquent |