draws their working mill. And
here I am able to show you, fortunately, one of his works painted at
this time of his most earnest thought; when his imagination was still
freshly filled with the Greek mythology, and he saw for the first time
with his own eyes the clouds come down upon the actual earth.

[Illustration: L'AIGUILLETTE, VALLEY OF CLUSES.

From the painting by Turner.]

99. The scene is one which, in old times of Swiss traveling, you would
all have known well; a little cascade which descends to the road from
Geneva to Chamouni, near the village of Maglans, from under a
subordinate ridge of the Aiguille de Varens, known as the Aiguillette.
You, none of you, probably, know the scene now; for your only object
is to get to Chamouni and up Mont Blanc and down again; but the Valley
of Cluse, if you knew it, is worth many Chamounis; and it impressed
Turner profoundly. The facts of the spot are here given in mere and
pure simplicity; a quite unpicturesque bridge, a few trees partly
stunted and blasted by the violence of the torrent in storm at their
roots, a cottage with its mill-wheel--this has lately been pulled down
to widen the road--and the brook shed from the rocks and finding its
way to join the Arve. The scene is absolutely Arcadian. All the
traditions of the Greek Hills, in their purity, were founded on such
rocks and shadows as these; and Turner has given you the birth of the
Shepherd Hermes on Cyllene, in its visible and solemn presence, the
white cloud, Hermes Eriophoros forming out of heaven upon the Hills;
the brook, distilled from it, as the type of human life, born of the
cloud and vanishing into the cloud, led down by the haunting Hermes
among the ravines; and then, like the reflection of the cloud itself,
the white sheep, with the dog of Argus guarding them, drinking from
the stream.

100. And now, do you see why I gave you, for the beginning of your
types of landscape thought, that "Junction of Tees and Greta" in their
misty ravines; and this glen of the Greta above, in which Turner has
indeed done his best to paint the trees that live again after their
autumn--the twilight that will rise again with twilight of dawn--the
stream that flows always, and the resting on the cliffs of the
clouds that return if they vanish; but of human life, he says, a boy
climbing among the trees for his entangled kite, and these white
stones in the mountain churchyard, show forth all the strength and all
the end.