It is always to do, by the happily easy
way of doing nothing. The grass is always ready to grow in the
streets--and no streets could ask for a more charming finish than your
green grass. The gasometer even must fall to pieces unless it is
renewed; but the grass renews itself. There is nothing so remediable as
the work of modern man--"a thought which is also," as Mr Pecksniff said,
"very soothing." And by remediable I mean, of course, destructible. As
the bathing child shuffles off his garments--they are few, and one brace
suffices him--so the land might always, in reasonable time, shuffle off
its yellow brick and purple slate, and all the things that collect about
railway stations. A single night almost clears the air of London.
But if the colour of life looks so well in the rather sham scenery of
Hyde Park, it looks brilliant and grave indeed on a real sea-coast. To
have once seen it there should be enough to make a colourist. O
memorable little picture! The sun was gaining colour as it neared
setting, and it set not over the sea, but over the land. The sea had the
dark and rather stern, but not cold, blue of that aspect--the dark and
not the opal tints.
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