A critical fancy may even discover in the construction of his finest descriptions a method not unlike that of a painter at work upon his canvas.  He blocks them out in large masses, then sketches and colors rapidly for general effects, treating detail at first more or less vaguely and collectively, but passing in the end to the elaboration of detail in the concrete, touching the whole with an imaginative gleam that lends a momentary semblance of life to the thing described, after the manner of the “pathetic fallacy.”  Thus it is in the famous description of St. Mark’s:[11] we are given first the largest general impression, the “long, low pyramid of coloured light,” which the artist proceeds to “hollow beneath into five great vaulted porches,” whence he leads the eye slowly upwards amidst a mass of bewildering detail—­“a confusion of delight”—­from which there slowly emerge those concrete details with which the author particularly wishes to impress us, “the breasts of the Greek horses blazing in their breadth of golden strength and St. Mark’s lion lifted on a blue field covered with stars.”  In lesser compass we are shown the environs of Venice,[12] the general impression of the “long, low, sad-coloured line,” being presently broken by the enumeration of unanalyzed detail, “tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows,” and passing to concrete detail in the hills of Arqua, “a dark cluster of purple pyramids.”  In the still more miniature description of the original site of Venice[13] we have the same method: 

“The black desert of their shore lies in its nakedness beneath the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the tideless pools and the sea-birds flit from their margins with a questioning cry.”

[Sidenote:  His love of color.]

Equally characteristic of the painter is the ever-present use of color.  It is interesting merely to count the number and variety of colors used in the descriptions.  It will serve at least to call the reader’s attention to the felicitous choice of words used in describing the opalescence of St. Mark’s or the skillful combination of the colors characteristic of the great Venetians in such a sentence as, “the low bronzed gleaming of sea-rusted armor shot angrily under their blood-red mantle-folds"[14]—­a glimpse of a Giorgione.

[Sidenote:  His love of prose rhythm.]

He is even more attentive to the ear than to the eye.  He loves the sentence of stately rhythms and long-drawn harmonies, and he omits no poetic device that can heighten the charm of sound,—­alliteration, as in the famous description of the streets of Venice,

    “Far as the eye could reach, still the soft moving of stainless
    waters proudly pure; as not the flower, so neither the thorn nor
    the thistle could grow in those glancing fields";[15]

the balanced close for some long period,