of it, all together being as round and vapid as the brush could draw them; or take the two cauliflower-like protuberances in No. 220 of the Dulwich Gallery, and admire the studied similarity between them; you cannot tell which is which; or take the so-called Nicholas Poussin, No. 212, Dulwich Gallery, in which, from the brown trees to the right-hand side of the picture, there is not one line which is not physically impossible.

But it is not the outline only which is thus systematically false. The drawing of the solid form is worse still, for it is to be remembered that although clouds of course arrange themselves more or less into broad masses, with a light congregated side and dark side, both their light and shade masses of cloud. are invariably composed of a series of divided

of

9. Vast size

masses, each of which has in its outline as much variety and character as the great outline of the cloud; presenting, therefore, a thousand times repeated, all that I have described as characteristic of the general form. Nor are these multitudinous divisions a truth of slight importance in the character of sky, for they are dependent on, and illustrative of, a quality which is usually in a great degree overlooked, -the enormous retiring spaces of solid clouds. Between the illumined edge of a heaped cloud, and that part of its body which turns into shadow, there will generally be a clear distance of several miles, more or less of course, according to the general size of the cloud, but in such large masses as in Poussin and others of the old masters, occupy the fourth or fifth of the visible sky; the clear illumined breadth of vapor, from the edge to the shadow, involves at least a distance of five or six miles. We are little apt, in watching the changes of a mountainous range of cloud, to le by compari- reflect that the masses of vapor which compose it, ain ranges. are huger and higher than any mountain range of the earth; and the distances between mass and mass are not ards of air traversed in an instant by the flying form, but valeys of changing atmosphere leagues over; that the slow motion. of ascending curves, which we can scarcely trace, is a boiling -nergy of exulting vapor rushing into the heaven a thousand Feet in a minute; and that the toppling angle whose sharp edge lmost escapes notice in the multitudinous forms around it, is a odding precipice of storms, 3000 feet from base to summit.

$10. Demonstra

son with moun

It is not until we have actually compared the forms of the sky with the hill ranges of the earth, and seen the soaring Alp overtopped and buried in one surge of the sky, that we begin to conceive or appreciate the colossal scale of the phenomena of the latter. But of this there can be no doubt in the mind of any one accustomed to trace the forms of clouds among hill ranges as it is there a demonstrable and evident fact, that the space of vapor visibly extended over an ordinarily cloudy sky, is not less, from the point nearest to the observer to the horizon, than twenty leagues; that the size of every mass of separate form, if it be at all largely divided, is to be expressed in terms of miles; and that every boiling heap of illuminated mist in the nearer sky, is an enormous mountain, fifteen or twenty thousand feet in height, six or seven miles over an illuminated surface, furrowed by a thousand colossal ravines, torn by local tempests into peaks and promontories, and changing its features with the majestic velocity of the volcano.

§ 11. And consequent divisions and varieties of feature.

To those who have once convinced themselves of these proportions of the heaven, it will be immediately evident, that though we might, without much violation of truth, omit the minor divisions of a cloud four yards over, it is the veriest audacity of falsehood to omit those of masses where for yards we have to read miles; first, because it is physically impossible that such a space should be without many and vast divisions; secondly, because divisions at such distances must be sharply and forcibly marked by aerial perspective, so that not only they must be there, but they must be visible and evident to the eye; and thirdly, because these multitudinous divisions are absolutely necessary, in order to express this space and distance, which cannot but be fully and imperfectly felt, even with every aid and evidence that art can give of it.

Now if an artist taking for his subject a chain of vast mountains, several leagues long, were to unite all their varieties of ravine, crag, chasm, and precipice, into one solid, unbroken § 12. Not lightly mass, with one light side and one dark side, looking like a white ball or parallelopiped two yards broad, the words "breadth," "boldness," or, "generalization," would scarcely be received as a sufficient apology for a

to be omitted.

proceeding so glaringly false, and so painfully degrading. But when, instead of the really large and simple forms of mountains, united, as they commonly are, by some great principle of comnon organization, and so closely resembling each other as often to correspond in line, and join in effect; when instead of this, we have to do with spaces of cloud twice as vast, broken up into multiplicity of forms necessary to, and characteristic of, their ery nature-those forms subject to a thousand local changes, having no association with each other, and rendered visible in thousand places by their own transparency or cavities, where the mountain forms would be lost in shade,-that this far greater space, and this far more complicated arrangement, hould be all summed up into one round mass, with one swell of white, and one flat side of unbroken gray, is considered an vidence of the sublimest powers in the artist of generalization nd breadth. Now it may be broad, it may be grand, it may be beautiful, artistical, and in every way desirable. I don't say it s not-I merely say it is a concentration of every kind of falseood it is depriving heaven of its space, clouds of their buoyney, winds of their motion, and distance of its blue.

*

13. Imperfect

his size and ex

This is done, more or less, by all the old masters, without an xception. Their idea of clouds was altogether similar; more or les perfectly carried out, according to their onceptions of power of hand and accuracy of eye, but universally ent in ancient the same in conception. It was the idea of a comndscape. paratively small, round, puffed-up white body, regularly associated with other round and puffed-up white odies, each with a white light side, and a gray dark side, and soft reflected light, floating a great way below a blue dome. uch is the idea of a cloud formed by most people; it is the rst, general, uncultivated notion of what we see every day. 'eople think of the clouds as about as large as they look-forty ards over, perhaps; they see generally that they are solid odies subject to the same laws as other solid bodies, roundish, hitish, and apparently suspended a great way under a high lue concavity. So that these ideas be tolerably given with nooth paint, they are content, and call it nature. How differ

* Here I include even the great ones-even Titian and Veronese, —ex

pting only Tintoret and the religious schools.

ent it is from anything that nature ever did, or ever will do, I have endeavored to show; but I cannot, and do not, expect the contrast to be fully felt, unless the reader will actually go out on days when, either before or after rain, the clouds arrange themselves into vigorous masses, and after arriving at something like a conception of their distance and size, from the mode in which they retire over the horizon, will for himself trace and watch their varieties of form and outline, as mass rises over mass in their illuminated bodies. Let him climb from step to step over their craggy and broken slopes, let him plunge into the long vistas of immeasurable perspective, that guide back to the blue sky; and when he finds his imagination lost in their immensity, and his senses confused with their multitude, let him go to Claude, to Salvator, or to Poussin, and ask them for a like space, or like infinity.

$ 14. Total want

and

evanescence

ancient landscape.

But perhaps the most grievous fault of all, in the clouds of these painters, is the utter want of transparency. Not in her most ponderous and lightless masses will nature ever leave us without some evidence of transmitted sunshine; of transparency and she perpetually gives us passages in which in the clouds of the vapor becomes visible only by the sunshine which it arrests and holds within itself, not caught on its surface, but entangled in its mass-floating fleeces, precious with the gold of heaven; and this translucency is especially indicated on the dark sides even of her heaviest wreaths, which possess opalescent and delicate hues of partial illumination, far more dependent upon the beams which pass through them than on those which are reflected upon them. Nothing, on the contrary, can be more painfully and ponderously opaque than the clouds of the old masters universally. However far removed in aerial distance, and however brilliant in light, they never appear filmy or evanescent, and their light is always on them, not in them. And this effect is much increased by the positive and persevering determination on the part of their outlines not to be broken in upon, nor interfered with in the slightest degree, by any presumptuous blue, or impertinent winds. There is no inequality, no variation, no losing or disguising of line, no melting into nothingness, nor shattering into spray; edge succeeds edge with imperturbable

equanimity, and nothing short of the most decided interference on the part of tree-tops, or the edge of the picture, prevents us from being able to follow them all the way round, like the coast of an island.

in space.

But

And be it remembered that all these faults and deficiencies are to be found in their drawing merely of the separate masses of the solid cumulus, the easiest drawn of all clouds. nature scarcely ever confines herself to such $15. Farther proof of their deficiency masses; they form but the thousandth part of her variety of effect. She builds up a pyramid of their boiling volumes, bars this across like a mountain with the gray cirrus, envelops it in black, ragged, drifting vapor, covers the open part of the sky with mottled horizontal fields, breaks through these with sudden and long sunbeams, tears up their edges with local winds, scatters over the gaps of blue the infinity of multitude of the high cirri, and melts even the unoccupied azure into palpitating shades. And all this is done over and over again in every quarter of a mile. Where Poussin or Claude have three similar masses, nature has fifty pictures, made up each of millions of minor thoughts-fifty aisles penetrating through angelic chapels to the Shechinah of the blue-fifty hollow ways among bewildered hills-each with their own nodding rocks, and cloven precipices, and radiant summits, and robing vapors, but all unlike each other, except in beauty, all bearing witness to the unwearied, exhaustless operation of the Infinite Mind. Now, in cases like these especially, as we observed before of general nature, though it is altogether hopeless to follow out in the space of any one picture this incalculable and inconceivable glory, yet the painter can at least see that the space he has at his command, na row and confined as it is, is made complete use of, and that no part of it shall be without entertainment and food for thought. If he could subdivide it by millionths of inches, he could not reach the multitudinous majesty of nature; but it is at least incumbent upon him to make the most of what he has, and not, by exaggerating the proportions, banishing the variety and repeating the forms of his clouds, to set at defiance the eternal principles of the heavens-fitfulness and infinity. And now let us, keeping in memory what we have seen of Poussin and Salvator,