the sky with
mottled horizontal fields, breaks through these with sudden and long
sunbeams, tears up their edges with local winds, scatters over the gaps
of blue the infinity of multitude of the high cirri, and melts even the
unoccupied azure into palpitating shades. And all this is done over and
over again in every quarter of a mile. Where Poussin or Claude have
three similar masses, nature has fifty pictures, made up each of
millions of minor thoughts--fifty aisles penetrating through angelic
chapels to the Shechinah of the blue--fifty hollow ways among bewildered
hills--each with their own nodding rocks, and cloven precipices, and
radiant summits, and robing vapors, but all unlike each other, except in
beauty, all bearing witness to the unwearied, exhaustless operation of
the Infinite Mind. Now, in cases like these especially, as we observed
before of general nature, though it is altogether hopeless to follow out
in the space of any one picture this incalculable and inconceivable
glory, yet the painter can at least see that the space he has at his
command, narrow and confined as it is, is made complete use of, and that
no part of it shall be without entertainment and food for thought. If he
could subdivide it by millionths of inches, he could not reach the
multitudinous majesty of nature; but it is at least incumbent upon him
to make the most of what he has, and not, by exaggerating the
proportions, banishing the variety and repeating the forms of his
clouds, to set at defiance the eternal principles of the
heavens--fitfulness and infinity. And now let us, keeping in memory what
we have seen of Poussin and Salvator, take up one of Turner's skies,
and see whether _he_ is as narrow in his conception, or as niggardly in
his space. It does not matter which we take, his sublime Babylon[33] is
a fair example for our present purpose. Ten miles away, down the
Euphrates, where it gleams last along the plain, he gives us a drift of
dark elongated vapor, melting beneath into a dim haze which embraces the
hills on the horizon. It is exhausted with its own motion, and broken up
by the wind in its own body into numberless groups of billowy and
tossing fragments, which, beaten by the weight of storm down to the
earth, are just lifting themselves again on wearied wings, and perishing
in the effort. Above these, and far beyond them, the eye goes back to a
broad sea of white, illuminated mist, or rather cloud melted into rain,
and abso