n faint white threads and fringes, through which the blue
shines more and more intensely, till the last trace of vapor is lost in
its perfect color. It is only the upper white clouds, however, which do
this, or the last fragments of rain-clouds, becoming white as they
disappear, so that the blue is never _corrupted_ by the cloud, but only
paled and broken with pure white, the purest white which the sky ever
shows. Thus we have a melting and palpitating color, never the same for
two inches together, deepening and broadening here and there into
intensity of perfect azure, then drifted and dying away through every
tone of pure pale sky, into the snow white of the filmy cloud. Over this
roll the determined edges of the rain-clouds, throwing it all far back,
as a retired scene, into the upper sky. Of this effect the old masters,
as far as I remember, have taken no cognizance whatsoever; all with them
is, as we partially noticed before, either white cloud or pure blue:
they have no notion of any double-dealing or middle measures. They bore
a hole in the sky, and let you up into a pool of deep, stagnant blue,
marked off by the clear round edges of imperturbable, impenetrable cloud
on all sides--beautiful in positive color, but totally destitute of that
exquisite gradation and change, that fleeting, panting, hesitating
effort, with which the first glance of the natural sky is shed through
the turbulence of the earth-storm.

Sec. 24. Success of our water-color artists in its rendering. Use of it by
Turner.

They have some excuse, however, for not attempting this, in the nature
of their material, as one accidental dash of the brush with water-color
on a piece of wet or damp paper, will come nearer the truth and
transparency of this rain-blue than the labor of a day in oils; and the
purity and felicity of some of the careless, melting water-color skies
of Cox and Tayler may well make us fastidious in all effects of this
kind. It is, however, only in the drawings of Turner that we have this
perfect transparency and variation of blue, given in association with
the perfection of considered form. In Tayler and Cox the forms are
always partially accidental and unconsidered, often essentially bad, and
always incomplete; in Turner the dash of the brush is as completely
under the rule of thought and feeling as its slowest line; all that it
does is perfect, and could not be altered, even in a hairbreadth,
without injury; in addi