on its summit, surrounded by
the clouds and darkness of a furious storm, issuing from the mouths
of fiends;--uprooting the trees, and throwing down the rocks, above
the broken tables of the Law, of which the fragments lie in the
foreground.]

[Footnote 2: These conditions are mainly in the arrangement of the
lower rain-clouds in flakes thin and detached enough to be
illuminated by early or late sunbeams: their textures are then more
softly blended than those of the upper cirri, and have the
qualities of painted, instead of burnished or inflamed, color.

They were thus described in the 4th chapter of the 7th part of
'Modern Painters':--

"Often in our English mornings, the rain-clouds in the dawn form
soft level fields, which melt imperceptibly into the blue; or when
of less extent, gather into apparent bars, crossing the sheets of
broader cloud above; and all these bathed throughout in an
unspeakable light of pure rose-color, and purple, and amber, and
blue, not shining, but misty-soft, the barred masses, when seen
nearer, found to be woven in tresses of cloud, like floss silk,
looking as if each knot were a little swathe or sheaf of lighted
rain.

"No clouds form such skies, none are so tender, various,
inimitable; Turner himself never caught them. Correggio, putting
out his whole strength, could have painted them,--no other man."]

[Footnote 3: I did not, in writing this sentence, forget Mr.
Gladstone's finely scholastic enthusiasm for Homer; nor Mr.
Newton's for Athenian--(I wish it had not been also for
Halicarnassian) sculpture. But Byron loved Greece herself--through
her death--and _to_ his own; while the subsequent refusal of
England to give Greece one of our own princes for a king, has
always been held by me the most ignoble, cowardly, and lamentable,
of all our base commercial _im_policies.]

[Footnote 4: 'Deepening' clouds.--Byron never uses an epithet
vainly,--he is the most accurate, and therefore the most powerful,
of all modern describers. The deepening of the cloud is essentially
necessary to the redness of the orb. Ordinary observers are
continually unaware of this fact, and imagine that a red sun can be
darker than the sky round it! Thus Mr. Gould, though a professed
naturalist, and passing most of his life in the open air, over and
over again, in his 'British Birds,' draws the setting sun dark on
the sky!]

[Footnote 5: 'Like the blood he predicts.'--The astrological power
of the planet Ma