This is the desert blossoming like a
rose: not the obvious rose of gardens, but the multitudinous and various
flower that gathers once in the year in every hand's-breadth of the
wilderness. When June comes the sun has burnt all to leagues of
harmonious seed, coloured with a hint of the colour of harvest, which is
gradually changed to the lighter harmonies of winter. All this fine
chromatic scale passes within such modest boundaries that it is accused
as a monotony. But those who find its modesty delightful may have a
still more delicate pleasure in the blooming and blossoming of the sea.
The passing from the winter blue to the summer blue, from the cold colour
to the colour that has in it the fire of the sun, the kindling of the
sapphire of the Mediterranean--the significance of these sea-seasons, so
far from the pasture and the harvest, is imperceptible to ordinary
senses, as appears from the fact that so few stay to see it all
fulfilled. And if the tourist stayed, he would no doubt violate all that
is lovely and moderate by the insistence of his descriptions. He would
find adjectives for the blue sea, but probably he would refuse to search
for words for the white. A white Mediterranean is not in the legend.
Nevertheless it blooms, now and then, pale as an opal; the white sea is
the flower of the breathless midsummer.
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