t far be it from us to tell them that
they are incapable of feeling its beauty if they will seek it for
themselves. But if you have ever in your life had one opportunity with
your eyes and heart open, of seeing the dew rise from a hill-pasture, or
the storm gather on a sea-cliff, and if you have yet no feeling for the
glorious passages of mingled earth and heaven which Turner calls up
before you into breathing, tangible being, there is indeed no hope for
your apathy--art will never touch you, nor nature inform.

Sec. 29. Various instances.

It would be utterly absurd, among the innumerable passages of this kind
given throughout his works, to point to one as more characteristic or
more perfect than another. The Simmer Lake, near Askrig, for expression
of mist pervaded with sunlight,--the Lake Lucerne, a recent and
unengraved drawing, for the recession of near mountain form, not into
dark, but into _luminous_ cloud, the most difficult thing to do in
art,--the Harlech, for expression of the same phenomena, shown over vast
spaces in distant ranges of hills, the Ehrenbreitstein, a recent
drawing, for expression of mist, rising from the surface of water at
sunset,--and, finally, the glorious Oberwesel and Nemi,[41] for passages
of all united, may, however, be named, as noble instances, though in
naming five works I insult five hundred.

Sec. 30. Turner's more violent effects of tempest are never rendered by
engravers.

Sec. 31. General system of landscape engraving.

Sec. 32. The storm in the Stonehenge.

One word respecting Turner's more violent storms, for we have hitherto
been speaking only of the softer rain-clouds, associated with gusty
tempest, but not of the thunder-cloud and the whirlwind. If there be any
one point in which engravers disgrace themselves more than in another,
it is in their rendering of dark and furious storm. It appears to be
utterly impossible to force it into their heads, that an artist does
_not_ leave his color with a sharp edge and an angular form by accident,
or that they may have the pleasure of altering it and improving upon it;
and equally impossible to persuade them that energy and gloom may in
_some_ circumstances be arrived at without any extraordinary expenditure
of ink. I am aware of no engraver of the present day whose ideas of a
storm-cloud are not comprised under two heads, roundness and blackness;
and, indeed, their general principles of translation (as may be
dist