his mind, while the
faculties of imagination and execution appeared in renewed strength; all
conventionality being done away with by the force of the impression
which he had received from the Alps, after his long separation from
them. The drawings are marked by a peculiar largeness and simplicity of
thought: most of them by deep serenity, passing into melancholy; all by
a richness of color, such as he had never before conceived. They, and
the works done in following years, bear the same relation to those of
the rest of his life that the colors of sunset do to those of the day;
and will be recognised, in a few years more, as the noblest landscapes
ever yet conceived by human intellect.

Such has been the career of the greatest painter of this century. Many
a century may pass away before there rises such another; but what
greatness any among us may be capable of, will, at least, be best
attained by following in his path; by beginning in all quietness and
hopefulness to use whatever powers we may possess to represent the
things around us as we see and feel them; trusting to the close of life
to give the perfect crown to the course of its labors, and knowing
assuredly that the determination of the degree in which watchfulness is
to be exalted into invention, rests with a higher will than our own.
And, if not greatness, at least a certain good, is thus to be achieved;
for though I have above spoken of the mission of the more humble artist,
as if it were merely to be subservient to that of the antiquarian or the
man of science, there is an ulterior aspect in which it is not
subservient, but superior. Every archaeologist, every natural
philosopher, knows that there is a peculiar rigidity of mind brought on
by long devotion to logical and analytical inquiries. Weak men, giving
themselves to such studies, are utterly hardened by them, and become
incapable of understanding anything nobler, or even of feeling the value
of the results to which they lead. But even the best men are in a sort
injured by them, and pay a definite price, as in most other matters, for
definite advantages. They gain a peculiar strength, but lose in
tenderness, elasticity, and impressibility. The man who has gone, hammer
in hand, over the surface of a romantic country, feels no longer, in the
mountain ranges he has so laboriously explored, the sublimity or mystery
with which they were veiled when he first beheld them, and with which
they are adorned in the