of pure
resplendence. It is wrought to delight the eyes only; and does delight
them; and the man who did it assuredly had eyes in his head; but not much
more. It is not didactic art, but its author was happy; and it will do
the good, and the harm, that mere pleasure can do. But, opposite me, is
an early Turner drawing of the lake of Geneva, taken about two miles from
Geneva, on the Lausanne road, with Mont Blanc in the distance. The old
city is seen lying beyond the waveless waters, veiled with a sweet misty
veil of Athena's weaving; a faint light of morning, peaceful exceedingly,
and almost colorless, shed from behind the Voirons, increases into soft
amber along the slope of the Saleve, and is just seen, and no more, on
the fair warm fields of its summit, between the folds of a white cloud
that rests upon the grass, but rises, high and tower-like, into the
zenith of dawn above.

109. There is not as much color in that low amber light upon the
hillside as there is in the palest dead leaf. The lake is not blue, but
gray in mist, passing into deep shadow beneath the Voirons' pines; a few
dark clusters of leaves, a single white flower--scarcely seen--are all
the gladness given to the rocks of the shore. One of the ruby spots of
the eastern manuscript would give color enough for all the red that is in
Turner's entire drawing. For the mere pleasure of the eye, there is not
so much in all those lines of his, throughout the entire landscape, as in
half an inch square of the Persian's page. What made him take pleasure
in the low color that is only like the brown of a dead leaf? in the cold
gray of dawn--in the one white flower among the rocks--in these--and no
more than these?

110. He took pleasure in them because he had been bred among English
fields and hills; because the gentleness of a great race was in his
heart, and its powers of thought in his brain; because he knew the
stories of the Alps, and of the cities at their feet; because he had read
the Homeric legends of the clouds, and beheld the gods of dawn, and the
givers of dew to the fields; because he knew the faces of the crags, and
the imagery of the passionate mountains, as a man knows the face of his
friend; because he had in him the wonder and sorrow concerning life and
death, which are the inheritance of the Gothic soul from the days of its
first sea kings; and also the compassion and the joy that are woven into
the innermost fabric of every great imag