A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



American autumn, that flaunt themselves in red 

 shirts and mob caps, are seen through smoked 

 glass. Even the sharply outlined white clouds 

 of September that were so like majolica work in 

 their insistent contrast, have now ripened and 

 melted away at the edges, and have assumed an 

 entirely new fitness to the general drowse. 



If you have ever stood upon the Galata bridge 

 at Constantinople in the morning, and looked 

 across the Golden Horn upon Stamboul, you 

 must have been conscious that in those old coun 

 tries the atmosphere forever prevents colour from 

 becoming impertinent. Man has nowhere lifted 

 so much architectural blazonry into the air as 

 there. The historic city is a pile of softened 

 dyes gold, and crimson, and scarlet, melting 

 into impalpable greens and swept above and 

 below by a flashing cobalt blue. But it is like 

 a picture of Titian s with its imperishable gamut 

 of pigments played in a low key by time itself. 

 It is only in October that external Nature with 

 us puts on those vanishing distances. It is then 

 only that our Alleghanies and the great bulks of 

 the Rocky Mountains, which are so like the rug 

 ged peremptoriness of a Western statesman or a 

 muscular tragedian, catch up with the Tyrol in 

 spectral beauty. The sky drops down with a 

 mantle of gauze and wraps the peaks in opales 

 cent garments, so that the stalwart limbs of the 

 great range imitate the voluptuousness of a half- 

 draped beauty. There is always a week in Octo 

 ber when Nature holds a bit of yellow glass to 



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