en air, the
confused and fantastic mists float up along the hollows of the
mountains, white and pure, the resurrection in spirit of the new-fallen
rain, catching shadows from the precipices, and mocking the dark peaks
with their own mountain-like but melting forms till the solid mountains
seem in motion like those waves of cloud, emerging and vanishing as the
weak wind passes by their summits; while the blue, level night advances
along the sea, and the surging breakers leap up to catch the last light
from the path of the sunset.

[Illustration: OKEHAMPTON CASTLE.
From a painting by Turner.]

Sec. 27. Turner's power of rendering mist.

Sec. 28. His effects of mist so perfect, that if not at once understood,
they can no more be explained or reasoned on than nature
herself.

I need not, however, insist upon Turner's peculiar power of rendering
_mist_, and all those passages of intermediate mystery, between earth
and air, when the mountain is melting into the cloud, or the horizon
into the twilight; because his supremacy in these points is altogether
undisputed, except by persons to whom it would be impossible to prove
anything which did not fall under the form of a Rule of Three. Nothing
is more natural than that the studied form and color of this great
artist should be little understood, because they require for the full
perception of their meaning and truth, such knowledge and such time as
not one in a thousand possesses, or can bestow; but yet the truth of
them for that very reason is capable of demonstration, and there is hope
of our being able to make it in some degree felt and comprehended even
by those to whom it is now a dead letter, or an offence. But the
aerial and misty effects of landscape, being matters of which the eye
should be simply cognizant, and without effort of thought, as it is of
light, must, where they are exquisitely rendered, either be felt at
once, or prove that degree of blindness and bluntness in the feelings of
the observer which there is little hope of ever conquering. Of course
for persons who have never seen in their lives a cloud vanishing on a
mountain-side, and whose conceptions of mist or vapor are limited to
ambiguous outlines of spectral hackney-coaches and bodiless lamp-posts,
discern through a brown combination of sulphur, soot, and gaslight,
there is yet some hope; we cannot, indeed, tell them what the morning
mist is like in mountain air, bu