to spring into such beauty as is consistent with
disease and alternate with decay.

[Illustration: AESACUS AND HESPERIE.

From the painting by Turner.]

In the purest landscape, the _human_ subject is the immortality of the
soul by the faithfulness of love: in both the Turner landscapes it is
the death of the body by the impatience and error of love. The one is
the first glimpse of Hesperia to AEsacus:[13]

"Aspicit Hesperien patria Cebrenida ripa,
Injectos humeris siccantem sole capillos:"

in a few moments to lose her forever. The other is a mythological
subject of deeper meaning, the death of Procris.

[Footnote 13: Ovid, "Metamorphoses," XI. 769.]

94. I just now referred to the landscape by John Bellini in the
National Gallery as one of the six best existing of the purist school,
being wholly felicitous and enjoyable. In the foreground of it indeed
is the martyrdom of Peter Martyr; but John Bellini looks upon that as
an entirely cheerful and pleasing incident; it does not disturb or
even surprise him, much less displease in the slightest degree.

Now, the next best landscape[14] to this, in the National Gallery, is
a Florentine one on the edge of transition to the Greek feeling; and
in that the distance is still beautiful, but misty, not clear; the
flowers are still beautiful, but--intentionally--of the color of
blood; and in the foreground lies the dead body of Procris, which
disturbs the poor painter greatly; and he has expressed his disturbed
mind about it in the figure of a poor little brown--nearly
black--Faun, or perhaps the god Faunus himself, who is much puzzled by
the death of Procris, and stoops over her, thinking it a woeful thing
to find her pretty body lying there breathless, and all spotted with
blood on the breast.

[Footnote 14: (Of the Purist school.)]

95. You remember I told you how the earthly power that is necessary in
art was shown by the flight of Daedalus to the [Greek: herpeton] Minos.
Look for yourselves at the story of Procris as related to Minos in the
fifteenth chapter of the third book of Apollodorus; and you will see
why it is a Faun who is put to wonder at her, she having escaped by
artifice from the Bestial power of Minos. Yet she is wholly an
earth-nymph, and the son of Aurora must not only leave her, but
himself slay her; the myth of Semele desiring to see Zeus, and of
Apollo and Coronis, and this having all the same main interest. Once
understand that, and