e, in gazing on the sky; for the east is in all the glory of
sunrise, and the heads and the names of the mountains are uncertain
among the gorgeous colouring of the clouds. Would that we were a
painter! Oh! how we should dash, on the day and interlace it with night!
That chasm should be filled with enduring gloom, thicker and thicker,
nor the sun himself suffered to assuage the sullen spirit, now lowering
and threatening there, as if portentous of earthquake. Danger and fear
should be made to hang together for ever on those cliffs, and half-way
up the precipice be fixed the restless cloud ascending from the abyss,
so that in imagination you could not choose but hear the cataract. The
Shadows should seem to be stalking away like evil spirits before angels
of light--for at our bidding the Splendours should prevail against them,
deploying from the gates of Heaven beneath the banners of morn. Yet the
whole picture should be harmonious as a hymn--as a hymn at once sublime
and sweet--serene and solemn; nor should it not be felt as even
cheerful--and sometimes as if there were about to be merriment in
Nature's heart--for the multitude of the isles should rejoice--and the
new-woke waters look as if they were waiting for the breezes to enliven
them into waves, and wearied of rest to be longing for the motion
already beginning to rustle by fits along the sylvan shores. Perhaps a
deer or two--but we have opened a corner of the fringed curtains of our
eyes--the idea is gone--and Turner or Thomson must transfer from our
paper to his canvass the imperfect outline--for it is no more--and make
us a present of the finished picture.

Strange that, with all our love of nature and of art, we never were a
Painter. True that in boyhood we were no contemptible hand at a Lion or
a Tiger--and sketches by us of such cats springing or preparing to
spring in keelivine, dashed off some fifty or sixty years ago, might
well make Edwin Landseer stare. Even yet we are a sort of Salvator Rosa
at a savage scene, and our black-lead pencil heaps up confused
shatterings of rocks, and flings a mountainous region into convulsions,
as if an earthquake heaved, _in a way that is no canny_, making people
shudder as if something had gone wrong with this planet of ours, and
creation were falling back into chaos. But we love scenes of beautiful
repose too profoundly ever to dream of "transferring them to canvass."
Such employment would be felt by us to be desecration