ing in the rooms to
harmonize with them. There were a great many of the earlier period;
these seemed to me charming, but superficial, views of Nature. They
were of a character that he who runs may read,--obvious, simple,
graceful. The later pictures were quite a different matter;
mysterious-looking things,--hieroglyphics of picture, rather than
picture itself. Sometimes you saw a range of red dots, which, after
long looking, dawned on you as the roofs of houses,--shining streaks
turned out to be most alluring rivulets, if traced with patience and
a devout eye. Above all, they charmed the eye and the thought. Still,
these pictures, it seems to me, cannot be considered fine works of
Art, more than the mystical writing common to a certain class of minds
in the United States can be called good writing. A great work of Art
demands a great thought, or a thought of beauty adequately expressed.
Neither in Art nor literature more than in life can an ordinary
thought be made interesting because well dressed. But in a transition
state, whether of Art or literature, deeper thoughts are imperfectly
expressed, because they cannot yet be held and treated masterly.
This seems to be the case with Turner. He has got beyond the English
gentleman's conventional view of Nature, which implies a _little_
sentiment and a _very_ cultivated taste; he has become awake to what
is elemental, normal, in Nature,--such, for instance, as one sees in
the working of water on the sea-shore. He tries to represent these
primitive forms. In the drawings of Piranesi, in the pictures of
Rembrandt, one sees this grand language exhibited more truly. It is
not picture, but certain primitive and leading effects of light and
shadow, or lines and contours, that captivate the attention. I saw a
picture of Rembrandt's at the Louvre, whose subject I do not know
and have never cared to inquire. I cannot analyze the group, but I
understand and feel the thought it embodies. At something similar
Turner seems aiming; an aim so opposed to the practical and outward
tendency of the English mind, that, as a matter of course, the
majority find themselves mystified, and thereby angered, but for the
same reason answering to so deep and seldom satisfied a want in the
minds of the minority, as to secure the most ardent sympathy where any
at all can be elicited.

Upon this topic of the primitive forms and operations of nature, I am
reminded of something interesting I was looking at