tells only as a flat, sharp-edged film, of which multitudes
intersect and overtop one another, separated by the greater faintness of
the retiring masses. This is the most simple and easily imitated
arrangement possible, and yet, both in nature and art, it expresses
distance and size in a way otherwise quite unattainable. For thus, the
whole mass of one mountain being of one shade only, the smallest
possible difference in shade will serve completely to detach it from
another, and thus ten or twelve distances may be made evident, when the
darkest and nearest is an aerial gray as faint as the sky; and the
beauty of such arrangements carried out as nature carries them, to their
highest degree, is, perhaps, the most striking feature connected with
hill scenery: you will never, by any chance, perceive in extreme
distance, anything like solid form or projection of the hills. Each is a
dead, flat, perpendicular film or shade, with a sharp edge darkest at
the summit, and lost as it descends, and about equally dark whether
turned towards the light or from it; and of these successive films of
mountain you will probably have half a dozen, one behind another, all
showing with perfect clearness their every chasm and peak in the
outline, and not one of them showing the slightest vestige of solidity,
but on the contrary, looking so thoroughly transparent, that if it so
happens, as I have seen frequently, that a conical near hill meets with
its summit the separation of two distant ones, so that the right-hand
slope of the nearer hill forms an apparent continuation of the
right-hand slope of the left-hand farther hill, and _vice versa_, it is
impossible to get rid of the impression that one or the more distant
peaks is seen _through_ the other.

Sec. 14. Illustrated from the works of Turner and Stanfield. The Borromean
Islands of the latter.

I may point out in illustration of these facts, the engravings of two
drawings of precisely the same chain of distant hills,--Stanfield's
Borromean Islands, with the St. Gothard in the distance, and Turner's
Arona, also with the St. Gothard in the distance. Far be it from me to
indicate the former of these plates as in any way exemplifying the power
of Stanfield, or affecting his reputation; it is an unlucky drawing,
murdered by the engraver, and as far from being characteristic of
Stanfield as it is from being like nature, but it is just what I want,
to illustrate the particular error o