them. There is a curious description of David Cos lying on the
ground "to possess his spirit in humility and peace," of Copley
Fielding, as an aeronaut, "casting his whole soul into space." We
really cannot follow him, "exulting like the wild deer in the motion
of the swift mists," and "flying with the wild wind and sifted spray
along the white driving desolate sea, with the passion for nature's
freedom burning in his heart;" for such a chase and such a heart-burn
must have a frightful termination, unless it be mere nightmare. We see
"J. D. Harding, brilliant and vigorous," &c., "following with his
quick, keen dash the sunlight into the crannies of the rocks, and the
wind into the tangling of the grass, and the bright colour into the
fall of the sea-foam--various, universal in his aim;" after which very
fatiguing pursuit, we are happy to find him "under the shade of some
spreading elm;" yet his heart is oak--and he is "English, all English
at his heart." But Mr Clarkson Stanfield is a man of men--"firm, and
fearless, and unerring in his knowledge--stern and decisive in his
truth--perfect and certain in composition--shunning nothing,
concealing nothing, and falsifying nothing--never affected, never
morbid, never failing--conscious of his strength, but never
ostentatious of it--acquainted with every line and hue of the deep
sea--chiseling his waves with unhesitating knowledge of every curve of
their anatomy, and every moment of their motion--building his
mountains rock by rock, with wind in every fissure, and weight in
every stone--and modeling the masses of his sky with the strength of
tempest in their every fold." It is curious--yet a searcher after
nature's truths ought to know, as he is here told, that waves may be
anatomized, and must be _chiseled_, and that mountains are and ought
to be _built_ up rock by rock, as a wall brick by brick; no easy task
considering that there is a disagreeable "wind in every fissure, and
weight in every stone"--and that the aerial sky, incapable to touch,
must be "modeled in masses." All this is given after an equally
extravagant abuse of Claude, of Salvator Rosa, and Poussin. He finds
fault with Claude, because his sea does not "upset the flower-pots on
the wall," forgetting that they are put there because the sea could
not--with Salvator, for his "contemptible fragment of splintery crag,
which an Alpine snow-wreath" (which would have no business there)
"would smother in its first swell