the night has risen over the vastness of the departing form.

Sec. 22. Recapitulation.

And if, in effects of this kind, time be taken to dwell upon the
individual tones, and to study the laws of their reconcilement, there
will be found in the recent Academy pictures of this great artist a mass
of various truth to which nothing can be brought for comparison, which
stands not only unrivalled, but uncontended with, and which, when in
carrying out it may be inferior to some of the picked passages of the
old masters, is so through deliberate choice rather to suggest a
multitude of truths than to imitate one, and through a strife with
difficulties of effect of which art can afford no parallel example. Nay,
in the next chapter, respecting color, we shall see farther reason for
doubting the truth of Claude, Cuyp, and Poussin, in tone,--reason so
palpable that if these were all that were to be contended with, I should
scarcely have allowed any inferiority in Turner whatsoever;[18] but I
allow it, not so much with reference to the deceptive imitations of
sunlight, wrought out with desperate exaggerations of shade, of the
professed landscape painters, as with reference to the glory of Rubens,
the glow of Titian, the silver tenderness of Cagliari, and perhaps more
than all to the precious and pure passages of intense feeling and
heavenly light, holy and undefiled, and glorious with the changeless
passion of eternity, which sanctify with their shadeless peace the deep
and noble conceptions of the early school of Italy,--of Fra Bartolomeo,
Perugino, and the early mind of Raffaelle.

FOOTNOTES

[16] Of course I am not speaking here of treatment of chiaroscuro,
but of that quantity of depth of shade by which, _coeteris
paribus_, a near object will exceed a distant one. For the truth of
the systems of Turner and the old masters, as regards chiaroscuro,
vide Chapter III. of this Section, Sec. 8.

[17] More important, observe, _as matters of truth or fact_. It may
often chance that, as a matter of feeling, the tone is the more
important of the two; but with this we have here no concern.

[18] We must not leave the subject of tone without alluding to the
works of the late George Barrett, which afford glorious and exalted
passages of light; and John Varley, who, though less truthful in his
aim, was frequently deep in his feeling. Some of the sketches of De
Wint are also admirable in