ard, and returned by Lausanne and Geneva. He made a large
number of colored sketches on this journey, and realized several of them
on his return. The drawings thus produced are different from all that
had preceded them, and are the first which belong definitely to what I
shall henceforward call his Third period.

The perfect repose of his youth had returned to his mind, while the
faculties of imagination and execution appeared in renewed strength; all
conventionality being done away 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 recognized, in a few years more, as the noblest landscapes ever
yet conceived by human intellect.

225. 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 ad