PANORAMA OF SWITZERLAND.
The visitor to the Leicester Square rooms finds himself transported by Mr. Burford to the bleak top of Mount Righi, nearly 6,000 feet above the level of the sea, and surveys an uninterrupted view extending over seven can- tons, and embracing a circumference of three hundred miles at least; with glimpses into regions beyond where the heights become lost in the visible blue of the atmosphere. You stand on a point somewhat apart from the rest, midway between the loftiest peaks of snow towering to the North and the vallies which surround the foot of Mount Righi below; to the South stretches forth, for leagues on leagues, a rather more open country; of the Swiss lakes seventeen are under the eye, besides many smaller lakes, di- minished to ponds by the downward distance. " L'homme eat l'expression du sol ": before you is the character of the Swiss—indomitable, laborious, stern, yet playful. The vast distances prevent you at first from discerning the traits of life and civilization in the scene; and the town telescope, the opera-glass, is a needful companion to these mountains: with its help you learn to decipher the white specks that dot the land, descrying innumerable white houses; what seemed mere furrows between the ridges of rock ex- pand into vallies of immense extent, and what seemed almost a desert be- comes a region of smiling pastoral character.
The painting keeps up to the high standard of excellence attained by the two painters, Mr. Burford and Mr. Selous: it bears the test of the opera. glass as the real scene would the telescope: indeed, Ea perfectly is the space represented, that it is impossible to fancy that you are enclosed in a fixed circle of canvass; for the glass penetrates new fields of view, and the sight sports among every variety of form, making, as it were, discoveries, and encountering a diversity that cheats the sense, as it seems to mock the painful following of the pencil.
Previous page
