eside it, built against its very walls, a neat water-mill in full work.
By the mill flows a large river, with a weir all across it. The weir has
not been made for the mill, (for that receives its water from the hills
by a trough carried over the temple,) but it is particularly ugly and
monotonous in its line of fall, and the water below forms a dead-looking
pond, on which some people are fishing in punts. The banks of this river
resemble in contour the later geological formations around London,
constituted chiefly of broken pots and oyster-shells. At an inconvenient
distance from the water-side stands a city, composed of twenty-five
round towers and a pyramid. Beyond the city is a handsome bridge; beyond
the bridge, part of the Campagna, with fragments of aqueducts; beyond
the Campagna, the chain of the Alps; on the left, the cascades of
Tivoli.

This is, I believe, a fair example of what is commonly called an "ideal
landscape," _i.e._, a group of the artist's studies from nature,
individually spoiled, selected with such opposition of character as may
insure their neutralizing each other's effect, and united with
sufficient unnaturalness and violence of association to insure their
producing a general sensation of the impossible. Let us analyze the
separate subjects a little in this ideal work of Claude's.

Perhaps there is no more impressive scene on earth than the solitary
extent of the Campagna of Rome under evening light. Let the reader
imagine himself for a moment withdrawn from the sounds and motion of the
living world, and sent forth alone into this wild and wasted plain. The
earth yields and crumbles beneath his foot, tread he never so lightly,
for its substance is white, hollow, and carious, like the dusty wreck of
the bones of men.[M] The long knotted grass waves and tosses feebly in
the evening wind, and the shadows of its motion shake feverishly along
the banks of ruin that lift themselves to the sunlight. Hillocks of
mouldering earth heave around him, as if the dead beneath were
struggling in their sleep; scattered blocks of black stone, four-square,
remnants of mighty edifices, not one left upon another, lie upon them to
keep them down. A dull purple, poisonous haze stretches level along the
desert, veiling its spectral wrecks of massy ruins, on whose rents the
red light rests like dying fire on defiled altars. The blue ridge of the
Alban mount lifts itself against a solemn space of green, clear, quiet
sky