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e in what these licences consisted. Of the later Swiss drawings, one of the wildest and most impressive was the "St. Gothard"; Ruskin wanted to find Turner's point of view, and to see what alterations he had made. He told Turner so, and the artist, who knew that his picture had been realized from a very slight sketch, was naturally rather opposed to this test, as being, from his point of view, merely a waste of time and trouble. He tried to persuade the Ruskins that the Swiss Sonderbund war, then going on, made travelling unsafe, and so forth. But in vain. Mr. John was allowed to go, for the first time alone, without his parents, taking only a servant, and meeting the trustworthy Coutet at Geneva. With seven months at his own disposal, he did a vast amount of work, especially in drawing. The studies of mountain-form and Italian design, in the year before, had given him a greater interest in the "Liber Studiorum," Turner's early book of Essays in Composition. He found there that use of the pure line, about which he has since said so much, together with a thoughtfully devised scheme of light-and-shade in mezzotint, devoted to the treatment of landscape in the same spirit as that in which the Italian masters treated figure-subjects in their pen-and-bistre studies. And just as he had imitated the Rogers vignettes in his boyhood, now in his youth he tried to emulate the fine abstract flow and searching expressiveness of the etched line, and the studied breadth of shade, by using the quill-pen with washes. At first he kept pretty closely to monochrome. His object was form, and his special talent was for draughtsmanship rather than for colour. But it was this winter's study of the "Liber Studiorum" that started him on his own characteristic course; and while we have no pen-and-wash work of his before 1845 (except a few experiments after Prout), we find him now using the pen continually during the "Modern Painters" period. On reaching the Lake of Geneva he wrote, or sketched, one of his best-known pieces of verse, "Mont Blanc Revisited," and a few other poems followed, the last of the long series which had once been his chief interest and aim in life. With this lonely journey there came new and deeper feelings; with his increased literary power, fresh resources of diction; and he was never so near being a poet as when he gave up writing verse. Too condensed to be easily understood, too solemn in their movement to be tripping
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