a widely
different thing when nature herself takes a coloring fit, and does
something extraordinary, something really to exhibit her power. She has
a thousand ways and means of rising above herself, but incomparably the
noblest manifestations of her capability of color are in these sunsets
among the high clouds. I speak especially of the moment before the sun
sinks, when his light turns pure rose-color, and when this light falls
upon a zenith covered with countless cloud-forms of inconceivable
delicacy, threads and flakes of vapor, which would in common daylight be
pure snow white, and which give therefore fair field to the tone of
light. There is then no limit to the multitude, and no check to the
intensity of the hues assumed. The whole sky from the zenith to the
horizon becomes one molten, mantling sea of color and fire; every black
bar turns into massy gold, every ripple and wave into unsullied,
shadowless, crimson, and purple, and scarlet, and colors for which there
are no words in language, and no ideas in the mind,--things which can
only be conceived while they are visible,--the intense hollow blue of
the upper sky melting through it all,--showing here deep, and pure, and
lightless, there, modulated by the filmy, formless body of the
transparent vapor, till it is lost imperceptibly in its crimson and
gold. Now there is no connection, no one link of association or
resemblance, between those skies and the work of any mortal hand but
Turner's. He alone has followed nature in these her highest efforts; he
follows her faithfully, but far behind; follows at such a distance below
her intensity that the Napoleon of last year's exhibition, and the
Temeraire of the year before, would look colorless and cold if the eye
came upon them after one of nature's sunsets among the high clouds. But
there are a thousand reasons why this should not be believed. The
concurrence of circumstances necessary to produce the sunsets of which I
speak does not take place above five or six times in the summer, and
then only for a space of from five to ten minutes, just as the sun
reaches the horizon. Considering how seldom people think of looking for
sunset at all, and how seldom, if they do, they are in a position from
which it can be fully seen, the chances that their attention should be
awake, and their position favorable, during these few flying instants of
the year, is almost as nothing. What can the citizen, who can see only
the red light