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Pamela and I have just returned from a visit to the most wonderfully
beautiful painting which this city has ever seen--Church's "Heart of the
Andes"--which represents a lovely valley with its rich vegetation in all
the bloom and glory of a tropical summer--dotted with birds and flowers
of all colors and shades of color, and sunny slopes, and shady corners,
and twilight groves, and cool cascades--all grandly set off with a
majestic mountain in the background with its gleaming summit clothed in
everlasting ice and snow! I have seen it several times, but it is always
a new picture--totally new--you seem to see nothing the second time
which you saw the first. We took the opera glass, and examined its
beauties minutely, for the naked eye cannot discern the little wayside
flowers, and soft shadows and patches of sunshine, and half-hidden
bunches of grass and jets of water which form some of its most
enchanting features. There is no slurring of perspective effect about
it--the most distant--the minutest object in it has a marked and
distinct personality--so that you may count the very leaves on the
trees. When you first see the tame, ordinary-looking picture, your first
impulse is to turn your back upon it, and say "Humbug"--but your third
visit will find your brain gasping and straining with futile efforts to
take all the wonder in--and appreciate it in its fulness--and understand
how such a miracle could have been conceived and executed by human
brain
and human hands. You will never get tired of looking at the picture, but
your reflections--your efforts to grasp an intelligible Something--you
hardly know what--will grow so painful that you will have to go away
from the thing, in order to obtain relief. You may find relief, but you
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