ountains and torrents,
and knew therefore that Salvator could not paint them.

203. One of the most characteristic drawings of this period fortunately
bears a date, 1818, and brings us within two years of another dated
drawing, no less characteristic of what I shall henceforward call
Turner's Second period. It is in the possession of Mr. Hawkesworth
Fawkes of Farnley, one of Turner's earliest and truest friends; and
bears the inscription, unusually conspicuous, heaving itself up and down
over the eminences of the foreground--"PASSAGE OF MONT CENIS. J. M. W.
TURNER, January 15th, 1820."

The scene is on the summit of the pass close to the hospice, or what
seems to have been a hospice at that time,--I do not remember any such
at present,--a small square built house, built as if partly for a
fortress, with a detached flight of stone steps in front of it, and a
kind of drawbridge to the door. This building, about 400 or 500 yards
off, is seen in a dim, ashy gray against the light, which by help of a
violent blast of mountain wind has broken through the depth of clouds
which hang upon the crags. There is no sky, properly so called, nothing
but this roof of drifting cloud; but neither is there any weight of
darkness--the high air is too thin for it,--all savage, howling, and
luminous with cold, the massy bases of the granite hills jutting out
here and there grimly through the snow wreaths. There is a
desolate-looking refuge on the left, with its number 16, marked on it in
long ghastly figures, and the wind is drifting the snow off the roof and
through its window in a frantic whirl; the near ground is all wan with
half-thawed, half-trampled snow; a diligence in front, whose horses,
unable to face the wind, have turned right round with fright, its
passengers struggling to escape, jammed in the window; a little farther
on is another carriage off the road, some figures pushing at its wheels,
and its driver at the horses' heads, pulling and lashing with all his
strength, his lifted arm stretched out against the light of the
distance, though too far off for the whip to be seen.

204. Now I am perfectly certain that anyone thoroughly accustomed to the
earlier works of the painter, and shown this picture for the first time,
would be struck by two altogether new characters in it.

The first, a seeming enjoyment of the excitement of the scene, totally
different from the contemplative philosophy with which it would formerly
have bee