c of what I shall henceforward call Turner's Second
period. It is in the possession of Mr. Hawkesworth Fawkes of Farnley,
one of Turner's earliest and truest friends; and bears the inscription,
unusually conspicuous, heaving itself up and down over the eminences of
the foreground--"PASSAGE OF MONT CENIS. J. M. W. TURNER, January 15th,
1820."

The scene is on the summit of the pass close to the hospice, or what
seems to have been a hospice at that time,--I do not remember such at
present,--a small square-built house, built as if partly for a fortress,
with a detached flight of stone steps in front of it, and a kind of
drawbridge to the door. This building, about 400 or 500 yards off, is
seen in a dim, ashy grey against the light, which by help of a violent
blast of mountain wind has broken through the depth of clouds which
hangs upon the crags. There is no sky, properly so called, nothing but
this roof of drifting cloud; but neither is there any weight of
darkness--the high air is too thin for it,--all savage, howling, and
luminous with cold, the massy bases of the granite hills jutting out
here and there grimly through the snow wreaths. There is a
desolate-looking refuge on the left, with its number 16, marked on it in
long ghastly figures, and the wind is drifting the snow off the roof and
through its window in a frantic whirl; the near ground is all wan with
half-thawed, half-trampled snow; a diligence in front, whose horses,
unable to face the wind, have turned right round with fright, its
passengers struggling to escape, jammed in the window; a little farther
on is another carriage off the road, some figures pushing at its wheels,
and its driver at the horses' heads, pulling and lashing with all his
strength, his lifted arm stretched out against the light of the
distance, though too far off for the whip to be seen.

Now I am perfectly certain that any one thoroughly accustomed to the
earlier works of the painter, and shown this picture for the first time,
would be struck by two altogether new characters in it.

The first, a seeming enjoyment of the excitement of the scene, totally
different from the contemplative philosophy with which it would formerly
have been regarded. Every incident of motion and of energy is seized
upon with indescribable delight, and every line of the composition
animated with a force and fury which are now no longer the mere
expression of a contemplated external truth, but have origin in so