rapid intuition, the later ideas of science. He explained the
obscure light of the unilluminated part of the moon, knew that the sea
had once covered the mountains which contain shells, and the gatherings
of the equatorial waters above the polar.

He who thus penetrated into the most secret parts of nature preferred
always the more to the less remote, what, seeming exceptional, was an
instance of law more refined, the construction about things of a
peculiar atmosphere and mixed lights. He paints flowers with such
curious fidelity that different writers have attributed to him a
fondness for particular flowers, as Clement the cyclamen, and Rio the
jasmine; while at Venice there is a stray leaf from his portfolio
dotted all over with studies of violets and the wild rose. In him first,
appears the taste for what is _bizarre_ or _recherche_ in landscape:
hollow places full of the green shadow of bituminous rocks, ridged reefs
of trap-rock which cut the water into quaint sheets of light--their
exact antitype is in our own western seas; all solemn effects of moving
water; you may follow it springing from its distant source among the
rocks on the heath of the _Madonna of the Balances_, passing as a little
fall into the treacherous calm of the _Madonna of the Lake_, next, as a
goodly river below the cliffs of the _Madonna of the Rocks_, washing the
white walls of its distant villages, stealing out in a network of
divided streams in _La Gioconda_, to the sea-shore of the _Saint
Anne_--that delicate place, where the wind passes like the hand of some
fine etcher over the surface, and the untorn shells lie thick upon the
sand, and the tops of the rocks, to which the waves never rise, are
green with grass grown fine as hair. It is the landscape, not of dreams
or fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a
thousand with a miracle of finesse. Through his strange veil of sight
things reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light
of eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or
through deep water.

And not into nature only; but he plunged also into human personality,
and became above all a painter of portraits; faces of a modelling more
skilful than has been seen before or since, embodied with a reality
which almost amounts to illusion on dark air. To take a character as it
was, and delicately sound its stops, suited one so curious in
observation, curious in invention. So he pai