oe]bus" is no minor canon to smile complacently on
the matter; he has a jealousy in him, and won't let any be in a
melting mood with the clouds but himself; he tears aside your
curtains, and steam-like rags of capricious vapour--"the mouldering
sun, seeming not far away, but burning like a red-hot ball beside you,
and as if you could reach it, plunges through the rushing wind and
rolling cloud with headlong fall, as if it meant to rise no more,
dyeing all the air about it with blood." This is no fanciful
description, but among the comparative views of nature's and of
Turner's skies, as seen, and verified upon his affidavit, by a
graduate of Oxford; who may have an indisposition to boast of his
exclusive privilege.

"+Aerobato kai periphrono ton helion.+"

Accordingly, in "the effects of light rendered by modern art," our
author is very particular indeed. His extraordinary knowledge of the
sun's position, to a hair's-breadth in Mr Turner's pictures, and
minute of the day, is quite surprising. He gives a table of two pages
and a-half, of position and moment, "morning, noon, and afternoon,"
"evening and night." In more than one instance, he is so close, as
"five minutes before sunset."

Having settled the matter of the sky, our author takes the earth in
hand, and tosses it about like a Titan. "The spirit of the hills is
action, that of the lowlands, repose; and between these there is to be
found every variety of motion and of rest, from the inactive plain,
sleeping like the firmament, with cities for stars, to the fiery peaks
which, with heaving bosoms and exulting limbs, with clouds drifting
like hair from their bright foreheads, lift up their Titan hands to
heaven saying, 'I live for ever.'" We learn, too, a wonderful power in
the excited earth, far beyond that which other "naturalists" describe
of the lobster, who only, _ad libitum_, casts off a claw or so. "But
there is this difference between the action of the earth and that of a
living creature, that while the exerted limb marks its bones and
tendons through the flesh, the excited earth casts off the flesh
altogether, and its bones come out from beneath. Mountains are the
bones of the earth, their highest peaks are invariably those parts of
its anatomy, which in the plains lie buried under five-and-twenty
thousand feet of solid thickness of superincumbent soil, and which
spring up in the mountain ranges in vast pyramids or wedges, flinging
their garment of ea