e facts themselves, seen in their
natural relations to others. And the aim of the great inventive
landscape painter must be to give the far higher and deeper truth of
mental vision, rather than that of the physical facts, and to reach a
representation which, though it may be totally useless to engineers or
geographers, and, when tried by rule and measure, totally unlike the
place, shall yet be capable of producing on the far-away beholder's mind
precisely the impression which the reality would have produced, and
putting his heart into the same state in which it would have been, had
he verily descended into the valley from the gorges of Airolo.

Sec. 12. Now observe; if in his attempt to do this the artist does not
understand the sacredness of the truth of _Impression_, and supposes
that, once quitting hold of his first thought, he may by Philosophy
compose something prettier than he saw, and mightier than he felt, it is
all over with him. Every such attempt at composition will be utterly
abortive, and end in something that is neither true nor fanciful;
something geographically useless, and intellectually absurd.

But if, holding fast his first thought, he finds other ideas insensibly
gathering to it, and, whether he will or not, modifying it into
something which is not so much the image of the place itself, as the
spirit of the place, let him yield to such fancies, and follow them
wherever they lead. For, though error on this side is very rare among us
in these days, it _is_ possible to check these finer thoughts by
mathematical accuracies, so as materially to impair the imaginative
faculty. I shall be able to explain this better after we have traced the
actual operation of Turner's mind on the scene under discussion.

Sec. 13. Turner was always from his youth fond of stones (we shall see
presently why). Whether large or small, loose or embedded, hewn into
cubes or worn into boulders, he loved them as much as William Hunt loves
pineapples and plums. So that this great litter of fallen stones, which
to any one else would have been simply disagreeable, was to Turner much
the same as if the whole valley had been filled with plums and
pineapples, and delighted him exceedingly, much more than even the gorge
of Dazio Grande just above. But that gorge had its effect upon him also,
and was still not well out of his head when the diligence stopped at the
bottom of the hill, just at that turn of the road on the right of the
bri