floated into
that new world where all things seem divine.

* * * * *

WET-WEATHER WORK.

BY A FARMER.

III.

Will any of our artists ever give us, on canvas, a good, rattling, saucy
shower? There is room in it for a rare handling of the brush:--the
vague, indistinguishable line of hills, (as I see them to-day,)--the
wild scud of gray, with fine gray lines, slanted by the wind, and
trending eagerly downward,--the swift, petulant dash into the little
pools of the highway, making fairy bubbles that break as soon as they
form,--the land smoking with excess of moisture,--and the pelted leaves
all wincing and shining and adrip.

I know no painter who has so well succeeded in putting a wet sky into
his pictures as Turner; and in this I judge him by the literal
_chiaroscuro_ of engraving. In proof of it, I take down from my shelf
his "Rivers of France": a book over which I have spent a great many
pleasant hours, and idle ones too,--if it be idle to travel leagues at
the turning of a page, and to see hill-sides spotty with vineyards, and
great bridges wallowing through the Loire, and to watch the fishermen of
Honfleur putting to sea. There are skies, as I said, in some of these
pictures which make a man instinctively think of his umbrella, or of his
distance from home: no actual rain-drift stretching from them, but such
unmistakable promise of a rainy afternoon, in their little parallel
wisps of dark-bottomed clouds, as would make a provident farmer order
every scythe out of the field.

In the "Chair of Gargantua," on which my eye falls, as I turn over the
pages, an actual thunder-storm is breaking. The scene is somewhere upon
the Lower Seine. From the middle of the left of the picture the lofty
river-bank stretches far across, forming all the background;--its
extreme distance hidden by a bold thrust of the right bank, which juts
into the picture just far enough to shelter a white village, which lies
gleaming upon the edge of the water. On all the foreground lies the
river, broad as a bay. The storm is coming down the stream. Over the
left spur of the bank, and over the meeting of the banks, it broods
black as night. Through a little rift there is a glimpse of serene sky,
from which a mellow light streams down upon the edges and angles of a
few cliffs upon the farther shore. All the rest is heavily shadowed. The
edges of the coming tempest are tortuous and convulsed, and you know