tion to this, peculiar management and execution
are used in obtaining quality in the color itself, totally different
from the manipulation of any other artist; and none, who have ever spent
so much as one hour of their lives over his drawing, can forget those
dim passages of dreamy blue, barred and severed with a thousand delicate
and soft and snowy forms, which, gleaming in their patience of hope
between the troubled rushing of the racked earth-cloud, melt farther and
farther back into the height of heaven, until the eye is bewildered and
the heart lost in the intensity of their peace. I do not say that this
is beautiful--I do not say it is ideal, nor refined--I only ask you to
watch for the first opening of the clouds after the next south rain, and
tell me if it be not _true_?

Sec. 25. Expression of near rain-cloud in the Gosport, and other works.

Sec. 26. Contrasted with Gaspar Poussin's rain-cloud in the Dido and Aeneas.

The Gosport affords us an instance more exquisite even than the passage
above named in the Coventry, of the use of this melting and dewy blue,
accompanied by two distances of rain-cloud, one towering over the
horizon, seen blue with excessive distance through crystal atmosphere;
the other breaking overhead in the warm, sulphurous fragments of spray,
whose loose and shattering transparency, being the most essential
characteristic of the near rain-cloud, is precisely that which the old
masters are sure to contradict. Look, for instance, at the wreaths of
_cloud_? in the Dido and Aeneas of Gaspar Poussin, with their unpleasant
edges cut as hard and solid and opaque and smooth as thick black paint
can make them, rolled up over one another like a dirty sail badly
reefed; or look at the agreeable transparency and variety of the
cloud-edge where it cuts the Mountain in N. Poussin's Phocion, and
compare this with the wreaths which float across the precipice in the
second vignette in Campbell, or which gather around the Ben Lomond, the
white rain gleaming beneath their dark transparent shadows; or which
drift up along the flanks of the wooded hills, called from the river by
the morning light, in the Oakhampton; or which island the crags of
Snowdon in the Llanberis, or melt along the Cumberland hills, while
Turner leads us across the sands of Morecambe Bay. This last drawing
deserves especial notice; it is of an evening in spring, when the south
rain has ceased at sunset, and through the lulled and gold