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