inciples of the engravers (_vide_
Paestum, in Rogers's Italy, and the Stonehenge, above alluded to) are
rounded outline, no edges, want of character, equality of strength, and
blackness without depth.

Sec. 34. Recapitulation of the section.

I have scarcely, I see, on referring to what I have written,
sufficiently insisted on Turner's rendering of the rainy _fringe_,
whether in distances, admitting or concealing more or less of the
extended plain, as in the Waterloo, and Richmond (with the girl and dog
in the foreground,) or as in the Dunstaffnage, Glencoe, St. Michael's
Mount, and Slave Ship, not reaching the earth, but suspended in waving
and twisted lines from the darkness of the zenith. But I have no time
for farther development of particular points; I must defer discussion of
them until we take up each picture to be viewed as a whole; for the
division of the sky which I have been obliged to make, in order to
render fully understood the peculiarities of character in the separate
cloud regions, prevents my speaking of any one work with justice to its
concentration of various truth. Be it always remembered that we pretend
not, at present, to give any account or idea of the sum of the works of
any painter, much less of the universality of Turner's; but only to
explain in what real truth, as far as it is explicable, consists, and to
illustrate it by those pictures in which it most distinctly occurs, or
from which it is most visibly absent. And it will only be in the full
and separate discussion of individual works, when we are acquainted also
with what is beautiful, that we shall be completely able to prove or
disprove the presence of the truth of nature.

The conclusion, then, to which we are led by our present examination of
the truth of clouds, is, that the old masters attempted the
representation of only one among the thousands of their systems of
scenery, and were altogether false in the little they attempted; while
we can find records in modern art of every form or phenomenon of the
heavens, from the highest film that glorifies the ether to the wildest
vapor that darkens the dust, and in all these records we find the most
clear language and close thought, firm words, and true message,
unstinted fulness and unfailing faith.

Sec. 35. Sketch of a few of the skies of nature, taken as a whole, compared
with the works of Turner and of the old masters. Morning on the
plains.

Sec. 36. Noon wit