s his neglected years in fruitful peace, and count every
day well spent that has given softness to a shadow, or light to a smile.

III.

_On Duerer's landscape, with reference to the sentence on p. 101_:
"I hope you are pleased."

252. I spoke just now only of the ill-shaped body of this figure of
Fortune, or Pleasure. Beneath her feet is an elaborate landscape. It is
all drawn out of Duerer's head;--he would look at bones or tendons
carefully, or at the leaf details of foreground;--but at the breadth
and loveliness of real landscape, never.

He has tried to give you a bird's-eye view of Germany; rocks, and woods,
and clouds, and brooks, and the pebbles in their beds, and mills, and
cottages, and fences, and what not; but it is all a feverish dream,
ghastly and strange, a monotone of diseased imagination.

And here is a little bit of the world he would not look at--of the great
river of his land, with a single cluster of its reeds, and two boats,
and an island with a village, and the way for the eternal waters opened
between the rounded hills.[BP]

It is just what you may see any day, anywhere,--innocent, seemingly
artless; but the artlessness of Turner is like the face of
Gainsborough's village girl, and a joy forever.

IV.

_On the study of anatomy._

253. The virtual beginner of artistic anatomy in Italy was a man called
'The Poulterer'--from his grandfather's trade; 'Pollajuolo,' a man of
immense power, but on whom the curse of the Italian mind in this age[BQ]
was set at its deepest.

Any form of passionate excess has terrific effects on body and soul, in
nations as in men; and when this excess is in rage, and rage against
your brother, and rage accomplished in habitual deeds of blood,--do you
think Nature will forget to set the seal of her indignation upon the
forehead? I told you that the great division of spirit between the
northern and southern races had been reconciled in the Val d'Arno. The
Font of Florence, and the Font of Pisa, were as the very springs of the
life of the Christianity which had gone forth to teach all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Prince of Peace. Yet these two brother
cities were to each other--I do not say as Abel and Cain, but as
Eteocles and Polynices, and the words of AEschylus are now fulfilled in
them to the uttermost. The Arno baptizes the