• Ruskin, Modern Painters , III 248:⁠— “There is only one more point to be noticed in the Dantesque landscape; namely, the feeling entertained by the poet towards the sky. And the love of mountains is so closely connected with the love of clouds, the sublimity of both depending much on their association, that, having found Dante regardless of the Carrara mountains as seen from San Miniato, we may well expect to find him equally regardless of the clouds in which the sun sank behind them. Accordingly, we find that his only pleasure in the sky depends on its ‘white clearness,’⁠—that turning into bianco aspetto di celestro , which is so peculiarly characteristic of fine days in Italy. His pieces of pure pale light are always exquisite. In the dawn on the purgatorial mountain, first, in its pale white, he sees the tremolar della marina ⁠—trembling of the sea; then it becomes vermilion; and at last, near sunrise, orange. These are precisely the changes of a calm and perfect dawn. The scenery of Paradise begins with ‘day added to day,’ the light of the sun so flooding the heavens, that ‘never rain nor river made lake so wide’; and throughout the Paradise all the beauty depends on spheres of light, or stars, never on clouds.