called "After
Sunset," the "Forest Scene," where it seems always afternoon, the gray
"Mountain Landscape," a world composed of stern materials, the cool
"Sunrise on the Mediterranean," up to the broad, pure, Elysian daylight
of the "Italian Landscape," with atmosphere full of music, color, and
perfume, cooled and shaded by the breezy pines, open far away to the
sea, and the sky peopled with opalescent clouds, trooping wide on their
celestial errands.

Of this last landscape the poetic merit is as great as the artistic
excellence is unrivalled. Whoever has made pictures and handled colors
knows well that a subject pitched on a high key of light is vastly more
difficult to manage than one of which the highest light is not above the
middle tint. To keep on that high key which belongs to broad daylight,
and yet preserve harmony, repose, and atmosphere, is in the highest
degree difficult; but here it is successfully done, and again reminds us
of the Paul Veronese treatment. Though a quiet picture, it is full of
brilliancy. It represents a broad and partly shaded expanse, full, also,
of light and sweet sunshine, through which the eye travels till it rests
on the distant mountain, rising majestically in grand volcanic forms
from the horizon plains. The sky is filled with cloudy veils, floating,
prismatic; some quiet water, crossed by a bridge which rests on round
arches, is in the middle distance; and a few trees near the foreground
form the group from which rises the stone-pine, which is the principal
feature in the picture, and gives it its character. As I write this, I
fear that any reader who has not seen the picture to which I refer will
immediately think of Turner's Italian landscapes, so familiar to all the
world through engravings, where a stone-pine is lifted against the sky
as a mass of dark to contrast with the mass of light necessarily in the
same region of the picture. But such effects, however legitimate and
powerful in the hands of Turner, were not in Allston's manner; they
would ruin and break the still harmony which was the law of his mind and
of his compositions. Under this tree, on the path, fall flickering spots
of sunshine, in which sit or stand two or three figures. The scarlet and
white of their dresses, catching the sunshine, make the few high notes
that cause the whole piece to throb like music.

There is also a large Swiss landscape, possessing in an extraordinary
degree the pure, keen atmosphere, as