Turner's efforts at rendering this effect
(as the Wilderness of Engedi, Assos, Chateau de Blois,
Caerlaverock, and others innumerable,) have always some slight
appearance of mistiness, owing to the indistinctness of details; but
it remains to be shown that any closer approximation to the effect
is possible.

SECTION III.

OF TRUTH OF SKIES.

CHAPTER I.

OF THE OPEN SKY.

Sec. 1. The peculiar adaptation of the sky to the pleasing and teaching of
man.

Sec. 2. The carelessness with which its lessons are received.

Sec. 3. The most essential of these lessons are the gentlest.

Sec. 4. Many of our ideas of sky altogether conventional.

It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky.
It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sake of
pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him
and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the
part in which we least attend to her. There are not many of her other
works in which some more material or essential purpose than the mere
pleasing of man is not answered by every part of their organization; but
every essential purpose of the sky might, so far as we know, be
answered, if once in three days, or thereabouts, a great ugly black rain
cloud were brought up over the blue, and everything well watered, and so
all left blue again till next time, with perhaps a film of morning and
evening mist for dew. And instead of this, there is not a moment of any
day of our lives, when nature is not producing scene after scene,
picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such
exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is
quite certain it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual
pleasure. And every man, wherever placed, however far from other sources
of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly. The noblest
scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few; it is not intended
that man should live always in the midst of them, he injures them by his
presence, he ceases to feel them if he be always with them; but the sky
is for all; bright as it is, it is not "too bright, nor good, for human
nature's daily food;" it is fitted in all its functions for the
perpetual comfort and