olors of mountain foregrounds can never be seen in
perfection unless they _are_ wet; nor _can moisture be entirely
expressed except by fulness of color_. So that Poussin, in search of a
false sublimity, painting every object in his picture, vegetation and
all, of one dull grey and brown, has actually rendered it impossible for
an educated eye to conceive it as representing rain at all; it is a dry,
volcanic darkness. It may be said that had he painted the effect of rain
truly, the picture, composed of the objects he has introduced, would
have become too pretty for his purpose. But his error, and the error of
landscapists in general, is in seeking to express terror by false
treatment, instead of going to Nature herself to ask her what she has
appointed to be everlastingly terrible. The greatest genius would be
shown by taking the scene in its plainest and most probable facts; not
seeking to change pity into fear, by denying the beauty of the world
that was passing away. But if it were determined to excite fear, and
fear only, it ought to have been done by imagining the true ghastliness
of the tottering cliffs of Ararat or Caucasus, as the heavy waves first
smote against the promontories that until then had only known the thin
fanning of the upper air of heaven;--not by painting leaves and grass
slate-grey. And a new world of sublimity might be opened to us, if any
painter of power and feeling would devote himself, for a few months, to
these solemn cliffs of the dark limestone Alps, and would only paint one
of them, as it truly stands, not in rain nor storm, but in its own
eternal sadness: perhaps best on some fair summer evening, when its
fearful veil of immeasurable rock is breathed upon by warm air, and
touched with fading rays of purple; and all that it has of the
melancholy of ruin, mingled with the might of endurance, and the
foreboding of danger, rises in its grey gloom against the gentle sky;
the soft wreaths of the evening clouds expiring along its ridges one by
one, and leaving it, at last, with no light but that of its own
cascades, standing like white pillars here and there along its sides,
motionless and soundless in their distance.

Sec. 25. Here, however, we must leave these more formidable examples of the
Alpine precipice, to examine those which, by Turner or by artists in
general, have been regarded as properly within the sphere of their art.

Turner had in this respect some peculiar views induced by earl