When all of this begins to grow upon your once blank canvas, and some lucky pat matches the exact tone of blue-gray haze or shimmer of leaf, or some accidental blending of color delights you with its truth, a tingling goes down your backbone, and a rush surges through your veins that stirs you as nothing else in your whole life will ever do. The reaction comes the next day when, in the cold light of your studio, you see how far short you have come and how crude and false is your best touch compared with the glory of the landscape in your mind and heart. But the thrill that it gave you will linger forever!
Or come with me to Constantinople and let us study its palaces and mosques, its marvellous stuffs, its romantic history, its religions--most profound and impressive--its commerce, industries, and customs. Come to revel in color; to sit for hours, following with reverent pencil the details of an architecture unrivalled on the globe; to watch the sun scale the hills of Scutari and shatter its lances against the fairy minarets of Stamboul; to catch the swing and plash of the rowers rounding their _caiques_ by the bridge of Galata; to wander through bazaar and market, dotting down splashes of robe, turban, and sash; to rest for hours in cool tiled mosques, which in their very decay are sublime; to study a people whose rags are symphonies of color, and whose traditions and records breathe the sweetest poems of modern times.
And then, when we have caught our breath, let us wander into any one of the patios along the Golden Horn, and feast our eyes on columns of verd-antique, supporting arches light as rainbows, framing the patio of the Pigeon Mosque, the loveliest of all the patios I know, and let us run our eyes around that Moorish square. The sun blazes down on glistening marbles; gnarled old cedars twist themselves upward against the sky; flocks of pigeons whirl and swoop and fall in showers on cornice, roof, and dome; tall minarets like shafts of light shoot up into the blue. Scattered over the uneven pavement, patched with strips and squares of shadows, lounge groups of priests in bewildering robes of mauve, corn-yellow, white, and sea-green; while back beneath the cool arches bunches of natives listlessly pursue their several avocations.