From Goethe’s essay On Granite

[He has climbed a mountain…]

You rest here directly upon a ground that reaches into the deepest places of the earth; no newer layers, no ruins, heaped or swept together, have laid themselves between you and the solid ground of the primeval world; you do not walk here, as in those fruitful valleys, upon a continuous grave; these peaks have brought forth no living thing and have devoured no living thing; they are before all life and above all life. In this moment, when the inner attracting and moving powers of the earth are working as though directly upon me, when the influences of the heavens are hovering around me more closely, I become attuned to higher contemplations of nature, and just as the human spirit enlivens all, so there stirs in me also a parable, whose sublimity I cannot withstand. So lonely, I say to myself as I look down this completely bare peak and scarcely make out in the distance at the foot a meager moss growing, so lonely, I say, does the mood of a man become, who wants to open his soul only to the oldest, first, and deepest feelings of truth. Yes, he can say to himself: here, upon the most ancient, eternal altar, which is built directly upon the deeps of creation, I bring an offering to the being of all beings. I feel the primal and most solid beginnings of our existence; I look out over the world, upon its more rugged and more gentle valleys and upon its distant fruitful meadows; my soul rises above itself and above all, and longs for the heavens nearer it. But soon the burning sun calls back thirst and hunger, his human needs. He looks back upon those valleys from which his spirit had already soared.

Dante…took pleasure in the closure of a couplet which ‘with rhyme falls into silence’.

From Barbara Reynolds’ translator’s note in Dante’s Vita Nuova.

The flat cross-country between Chartres and Fontainbleau, with an oppressive sense of Paris to the north, fretted me wickedly; when we got to the Fountain of Fair Water I lay feverishly wakeful through the night, and was so heavy and ill in the morning that I could not safely travel, and fancied some bad sickness was coming on. However, towards twelve o’clock the inn people brought me a little basket of wild strawberries; and they refreshed me, and I put my sketch-book in pocket and tottered out, though still in an extremely languid and woe-begone condition; and getting into a cart-road among some young trees, where there was nothing to see but the blue sky through tin branches, lay down on the bank by the roadside to see if I could sleep. But I couldn’t, and the branches against the blue sky began to interest me, motionless as the branches of a tree of Jesse on a painted window.
Feeling gradually somewhat livelier, and that I wasn’t going to die this time, and be buried in the sand, though I couldn’t for the present walk any farther, I took out my book, and began to draw a little aspen tree, on the other side of the cart-road, carefully…
How I had managed to get into that utterly dull cart-road, when there were sandstone rocks to be sought for, the Fates, as I have so often to observe, only know…And to-day, I missed rocks, palace, and fountain all alike, and found myself lying on a bank of a cart-road in the sand, with no prospect whatever but that small aspen tree against the blue sky.
Languidly, but not idly, I began to draw it; and as I drew, the languor passed away: the beautiful lines insisted on being traced,–without weariness. More and more beautiful they became, as each rose out of the rest, and took its place in the air. With wonder increasing every instant, I saw that they “composed” themselves, by finer laws than any known of men. At last, the tree was there, and everything that I had thought before about trees, nowhere…This was indeed an end to all former thoughts with me, an insight into a new silvan world.
Not silvan only. The woods, which I had only looked on as wilderness, fulfilled I then saw, in their beauty, the same laws which guided the clouds, divided the light, and balanced the wave. “He hath made everything beautiful, in his time” became for me thenceforward the interpretation of the bond between the human mind and all visible things; and I returned along the wood-road feeling that it had led me far,—Farther than ever fancy had reached, or theodolite measured.

Ruskin’s Autobiography

“The transforming agent in nature,” writes Barfield, “is also the ultimate energy that stirs in the dark depths of [our] own will.“

Owen Barfield

But Luciano did not stucco his brick. He left it rough. In the second place his stone is white; pilasters are thin, plain, unfluted, immeasurably straight and smooth. Archivolts have a few deep lines. The stone, then, lies on the brick in low relief, yet stands out simple, distinct, a white magic, nitidezza. The unpassable space between window-frame and pilaster along the storey, or the exact framing of a window that lies back on the wall—for the colonnade beneath is broad—give so supreme an individuality to each stone shape (though every pilaster, for example, except for his place, is the same as the next), that one appears to witness a miraculous concurrence of masterpieces of sculpture, each designed to show the beauties of his neighbour as unique. There is no other traffic among them. Their positions are untraversable, and no hand shall dare to touch two stone forms at a time. They flower from the brick, a Whole made up of Ones each as single as the Whole. What could be more different from Brunellesque running lines, than this sublime fixture of the manifest?

Adrian Stokes, The Quattro Cento