-they are noon and morning effects with full
lateral light. Be so kind as to match the color of a leaf in the sun
(the darkest you like) as nearly as you can, and bring your matched
color and set it beside one of these groups of trees, and take a blade
of common grass, and set it beside any part of the fullest light of
their foregrounds, and then talk about the truth of color of the old
masters!

And let not arguments respecting the sublimity or fidelity of
_impression_ be brought forward here. I have nothing whatever to do with
this at present. I am not talking about what is sublime, but about what
is true. People attack Turner on this ground;--they never speak of
beauty or sublimity with respect to him, but of nature and truth, and
let them support their own favorite masters on the same grounds. Perhaps
I may have the very deepest veneration for the _feeling_ of the old
masters, but I must not let it influence me now--my business is to match
colors, not to talk sentiment. Neither let it be said that I am going
too much into details, and that general truths may be obtained by local
falsehood. Truth is only to be measured by close comparison of actual
facts; we may talk forever about it in generals, and prove nothing. We
cannot tell what effect falsehood may produce on this or that person,
but we can very well tell what is false and what is not, and if it
produce on our senses the effect of truth, that only demonstrates their
imperfection and inaccuracy, and need of cultivation. Turner's color is
glaring to one person's sensations, and beautiful to another's. This
proves nothing. Poussin's color is right to one, soot to another. This
proves nothing. There is no means of arriving at any conclusion but
close comparison of both with the known and demonstrable hues of nature,
and this comparison will invariably turn Claude or Poussin into
blackness, and even Turner into gray.

Whatever depth of gloom may seem to invest the objects of a real
landscape, yet a window with that landscape seen through it, will
invariably appear a broad space of light as compared with the shade of
the room walls; and this single circumstance may prove to us both the
intensity and the diffusion of daylight in open air, and the necessity,
if a picture is to be truthful in effect of color, that it should tell
as a broad space of graduated illumination--not, as do those of the old
masters, as a patch-work of black shades. Their works are nature in