dactic chiefly by being beautiful; but
beautiful with haunting thought, no less than with form, and full of
myths that can be read only with the heart.

For instance, at this moment there is open beside me as I write, a
page of Persian manuscript, wrought with wreathed azure and geld, and
soft green, and violet, and ruby and scarlet, into one field of pure
resplendence. It is wrought to delight the eyes only; and does delight
them; and the man who did it assuredly had eyes in his head; but not
much more. It is not didactic art, but its author was happy: and it
will do the good, and the harm, that mere pleasure can do. But,
opposite me, is an early Turner drawing of the lake of Geneva, taken
about two miles from Geneva, on the Lausanne road, with Mont Blanc in
the distance. The old city is seen lying beyond the waveless waters,
veiled with a sweet misty veil of Athena's weaving: a faint light of
morning, peaceful exceedingly, and almost colourless, shed from behind
the Voirons, increases into soft amber along the slope of the Saleve,
and is just seen, and no more, on the fair warm fields of its summit,
between the folds of a white cloud that rests upon the grass, but
rises, high and towerlike, into the zenith of dawn above.

There is not as much colour in that low amber light upon the hill-side
as there is in the palest dead leaf. The lake is not blue, but grey in
mist, passing into deep shadow beneath the Voirons' pines; a few dark
clusters of leaves, a single white flower--scarcely seen--are all the
gladness given to the rocks of the shore. One of the ruby spots of the
eastern manuscript would give colour enough for all the red that is in
Turner's entire drawing. For the mere pleasure of the eye, there is
not so much in all those lines of his, throughout the entire
landscape, as in half an inch square of the Persian's page. What made
him take pleasure in the low colour that is only like the brown of a
dead leaf? in the cold grey of dawn--in the one white flower among the
rocks--in these--and no more than these?

He took pleasure in them because he had been bred among English fields
and hills; because the gentleness of a great race was in his heart,
and its power of thought in his brain; because he knew the stories of
the Alps, and of the cities at their feet; because he had read the
Homeric legends of the clouds, and beheld the gods of dawn, and the
givers of dew to the fields; because he knew the faces of the crags,