at could not notice a thing unless it was forced upon them.
Some of the earlier pictures indeed, such as that of the frost-bound
lane, with the boy blowing on his fingers, and the horses nibbling at
the stiff grass, with the cold light of the winter's dawn coming slowly
up beyond the leafless hedge, seemed to him to be perfectly beautiful;
but the Turner of the later period, the Turner so wildly upheld by
Ruskin, seemed to Hugh to have lost sight of nature, in the pleasure of
constructing extravagant and fantastic schemes of colour. The true art
seemed to Hugh not to be the art that trumpets beauty aloud, and that
drags a spectator roughly to admire; but the art that waits quietly for
the sincere nature-lover, and gives a soft hint to which the soul of
the spectator can add its own emotion. To Hugh it was much a matter of
mood. He would go to a gallery of ancient or modern art, and find that
there many pictures had no message or voice for him; and then some
inconspicuous picture would suddenly appeal to him with a mysterious
force--the pathetic glance of childish eyes, or an old face worn by
toil and transfigured by some inner light of hopefulness; or a woodland
scene, tree-trunks rising amid a copse; or the dark water of a
sea-cave, lapping, translucent and gem-like, round rock ledges; or a
reedy pool, with the chimneys of an old house rising among elms hard
by: in a moment the mood would come upon him, and he would feel that a
door had been opened for his spirit into a place of sweet imaginings,
of wistful peace, bringing to him a hope of something that might
assuredly be, some deep haven of God where the soul might float upon a
golden tide. One day, for instance, two old line-engravings of Italian
pictures which he had inherited, and which hung in his little library,
gave him this sense; he had known them ever since he was a child, and
they had never spoken to him before. Had they hung all these years
patiently waiting for that moment? One was "The Betrothal of the
Virgin," by Raphael, where the old bearded priest in his tiara, with
his robes girt precisely about him, casts an inquiring look on the
pair, as Joseph, a worn, majestic figure, puts the ring on the Virgin's
finger. Some of it was hard and formal enough; the flowers on Joseph's
rod might have been made of china; the slim figure of the disappointed
suitor, breaking his staff, had an unpleasing trimness; and the
companions of the Virgin were models of f