n the most splendid physical phenomena, in
America, and other countries without any history. It is not of the
slightest use. Niagara, or the North Pole and the Aurora Borealis,
won't make a landscape; but a ditch at Iffley will, if you have
humanity in you--enough in you to interpret the feelings of hedgers
and ditchers, and frogs.

8. Next, here is one of the most beautiful landscapes ever painted,
the best I have next to the Greta and Tees.

The subject physically is a mere bank of grass above a stream with
some wych-elms and willows. A level-topped bank; the water has cut its
way down through the soft alluvion of an elevated plain to the
limestone rock at the bottom.

Had this scene been in America, no mortal could have made a landscape
of it. It is nothing but a grass bank with some not very pretty trees
scattered over it, wholly without grouping. The stream at the bottom
is rocky indeed, but its rocks are mean, flat, and of a dull yellow
color. The sky is gray and shapeless. There's absolutely nothing to
paint anywhere of essential landscape subject, as commonly understood.

Now see what the landscape consists in, which I have told you is one
of the most beautiful ever painted by man. There's first a little bit
of it left nearly wild, not quite wild; there's a cart and rider's
track through it among the copse; and then, standing simply on the
wild moss-troopers' ground, the scattered ruins of a great abbey, seen
so dimly, that they seem to be fading out of sight, in color as in
time.

These two things together, the wild copse wood and the ruin, take you
back into the life of the fourteenth century. The one is the
border-riders' kingdom; the other that of peace which has striven
against border-riding--how vainly! Both these are remains of the past.
But the outhouses and refectory of the abbey have been turned into a
farmhouse, and that is inhabited, and in front of it the Mistress is
feeding her chickens. You see the country is perfectly quiet and
innocent, for there is no trace of a fence anywhere; the cattle have
strayed down to the riverside, it being a hot day; and some rest in
the shade and two in the water.

They could not have done so at their ease had the river not been
humanized. Only a little bit of its stony bed is left; a mill weir,
thrown across, stays the water in a perfectly clear and delicious
pool; to show how clear it is, Turner has put the only piece of
playing color in all the picture int