d his senses confused with their
multitude, let him go to Claude, to Salvator, or to Poussin, and ask
them for a like space, or like infinity.

Sec. 14. Total want of transparency and evanescence in the clouds of
ancient landscape.

But perhaps the most grievous fault of all, in the clouds of these
painters, is the utter want of transparency. Not in her most ponderous
and lightless masses will nature ever leave us without some evidence of
transmitted sunshine; and she perpetually gives us passages in which the
vapor becomes visible only by the sunshine which it arrests and holds
within itself, not caught on its surface, but entangled in its
mass--floating fleeces, precious with the gold of heaven; and this
translucency is especially indicated on the dark sides even of her
heaviest wreaths, which possess opalescent and delicate hues of partial
illumination, far more dependent upon the beams which pass through them
than on those which are reflected upon them. Nothing, on the contrary,
can be more painfully and ponderously opaque than the clouds of the old
masters universally. However far removed in aerial distance, and however
brilliant in light, they never appear filmy or evanescent, and their
light is always on them, not in them. And this effect is much increased
by the positive and persevering determination on the part of their
outlines not to be broken in upon, nor interfered with in the slightest
degree, by any presumptuous blue, or impertinent winds. There is no
inequality, no variation, no losing or disguising of line, no melting
into nothingness, nor shattering into spray; edge succeeds edge with
imperturbable equanimity, and nothing short of the most decided
interference on the part of tree-tops, or the edge of the picture,
prevents us from being able to follow them all the way round, like the
coast of an island.

Sec. 15. Farther proof of their deficiency in space.

Sec. 16. Instance of perfect truth in the sky of Turner's Babylon.

And be it remembered that all these faults and deficiencies are to be
found in their drawing merely of the separate masses of the solid
cumulus, the easiest drawn of all clouds. But nature scarcely ever
confines herself to such masses; they form but the thousandth part of
her variety of effect. She builds up a pyramid of their boiling volumes,
bars this across like a mountain with the gray cirrus, envelops it in
black, ragged, drifting vapor, covers the open part of