the torn waves of
tossing radiance that gush from the sun, as you can count the fixed,
white, insipidities of Claude; or when you can measure the modulation
and the depth of that hollow mist, as you can the flourishes of the
brush upon the canvas of Salvator, talk of Turner's want of truth!

But let us take up simpler and less elaborate works, for there is too
much in these to admit of being analyzed.

Sec. 18. Truths of outline and character in his Como.

In the vignette of the Lake of Como, in Rogers's Italy, the space is so
small that the details have been partially lost by the engraver; but
enough remain to illustrate the great principles of cloud from which we
have endeavored to explain. Observe first the general angular outline of
the volumes on the left of the sun. If you mark the points where the
direction of their outline changes, and connect those points by right
lines, the cloud will touch, but will not cut, those lines throughout.
Yet its contour is as graceful as it is full of character--toppling,
ready to change--fragile as enormous--evanescent as colossal. Observe
how, where it crosses the line of the sun, it becomes luminous,
illustrating what has been observed of the visibility of mist in
sunlight. Observe, above all, the multiplicity of its solid form, the
depth of its shadows in perpetual transition: it is not round and
swelled, half light and half dark, but full of breaking irregular
shadow and transparency--variable as the wind, and melting
imperceptibly above into the haziness of the sunlighted atmosphere,
contrasted in all its vast forms with the delicacy and the multitude of
the brightly touched cirri. Nothing can surpass the truth of this; the
cloud is as gigantic in its simplicity as the Alp which it opposes; but
how various, how transparent, how infinite in its organization!

Sec. 19. Association of the cirrostratus with the cumulus.

I would draw especial attention, both here and in all other works of
Turner, to the beautiful use of the low horizontal bars or fields of
cloud, (cirrostratus,) which associate themselves so frequently--more
especially before storms--with the true cumulus, floating on its flanks,
or capping it, as if it were a mountain, and seldom mingling with its
substance, unless in the very formation of rain. They supply us with one
of those beautiful instances of natural composition, by which the artist
is superseded and excelled--for, by the occurrence of these hori