idealisation than that of any of the others; these, and not these alone, but Campbell, and Hogg, and Christopher North, had filled their works with landscape description, and had made their readers familiar with the countless changes of nature's grandeur and loveliness, from the purpling of the lake at dawn to "the lustrous gloom of leaden-coloured even."

The painter had followed in the wake of the poet, or had accompanied him, sharing a common inspiration. Gainsborough, writing in colour, was as true a poet as ever lived, and stood somewhat in the same relation to our recent school of landscape painting, as Cowper and Burns to our recent school of landscape poetry. But it was the English Water Colour School of painting that was pre-eminently the school of landscape. No other school known to the historian of art ever did so much to show what the forms and hues of nature really are; what witchery of grace, what eye-music of delicately woven lines, there is among the forest boughs; with what splendour, "ensaffroning the whole hillside," the sun can flood the air when near his setting; in one word, what beauty and comeliness this dwelling-place of man has received from the hand of its Maker. When we recollect Who it was that declared the loveliness of the lily of the field to excel that of Solomon in all his glory, we may be prepared to recognise a natural sacredness in the art that concerns itself with the trees and the flowers; and cannot but feel an appropriateness in the indisputable fact that the English school of landscape is distinguished by a vestal purity of feeling and association, placing it, in moral respects, almost on a level with the art of Angelico. Or why should I say " almost" on a level? Why should I not dare to be just to my own time, and affirm that the school of landscape painting, which has flourished in Great Britain, occupies a higher moral level than that of Angelico? The art of Angelico, with its mawkish saints, its monastic

J. M. W. Turner.

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quaintnesses, its enervating air of simpleton piety and nursery innocence, is unhealthy and, to the extent of its unhealthiness, unholy. Without purism, without sectarianism, the landscape art of England is delicately reverent of all manly religion, all home-bred virtue, and as wholesome in its influence as the grass of the mountains and the rain of the sky.

The English Water Colour School was just strong enough to furnish him with the instruments of his art, when there appeared in England one of those men of unique and transcendent powers, who are seldom born except at intervals of centuries-J. M. W. Turner. He stood in much the same relation, in respect of comprehensiveness and energy of genius, to the other landscape artists of his day, in which Shakespeare stood to the other dramatists of the Elizabethan age. The dramatists contemporary with Shakespeare were great, greater than any who have succeeded them in England; but none of them approached the greatness of Shakespeare. Prout, Fielding, Cotman, Crome, Bonington, Constable, Calcott, De Wint, and many others, contemporary with Turner, were admirable landscapists, but none was equal, none was second, to him. It was in vindication of Turner against the depreciation of reviewers that Ruskin wrote his first great book; and it then became apparent that, in addition to the English poets who had described nature in melodious verse, and the English painters who had depicted nature in expressive colour, an English critic of the first order had arisen, whose prose revealed the subtlety and the opulence of nature's beauty with an imaginative splendour equalling that of the poet, and a precision and graphic power hardly inferior to those of the painter.

Mr. Ruskin has sprinkled over his writings a good many intimations, all deeply interesting, as to his infancy and youth. "The first thing," he writes, "which I remember,

as an event in life, was being taken by my nurse to the brow of Friar's Crag on Derwentwater; the intense joy, mingled with awe, that I had in looking through the hollows in the mossy roots, over the crag, into the dark lake, has associated itself more or less with all twining roots of trees ever since." Two other things he remembers as being "in a sort, beginnings of life; crossing Shapfells (being let out of the chaise to run up the hills), and going through Glenfarg, near Kinross, in a winter's morning, when the rocks were hung with icicles." When he came near mountains he had a pleasure, from the earliest time he can recollect until he was eighteen or twenty, "infinitely greater" than he has since found in anything; "comparable for intensity only to the joy of a lover in being near a noble and kind mistress, but no more explicable or definable than that feeling of love itself."

The correctness of these reminiscences is proved in those verses which from the years of earliest boyhood, until he reached the age of twenty-six, he continued to produce. He prints in The Queen of the Air "one of many" of his childish rhymes, "written on a frosty day in Glen Farg, just north of Loch Leven," when he had almost completed his ninth year.

Papa, how pretty those icicles are,

That are seen so near, that are seen so far;

Those dropping waters that come from the rocks,

And many a hole, like the haunt of a fox.

That silvery stream that runs babbling along,

Making a murmuring, dancing song.

Those trees that stand waving upon the rock's-side,

And men, that, like spectres, among them glide,

And waterfalls that are heard from far,

And come in sight when very near.

And the water-wheel that turns slowly round,
Grinding the corn that requires to be ground,—

And mountains at a distance seen,

And rivers winding through the plain.

And quarries with their craggy stones,

And the wind among them moans.

What a great deal the little fellow manages to get into his lines! And is not his observation nice, are not his epithets happy? Every one who has approached a waterfall through woodland must remember how long he heard it sounding through the trees, and how often he was disappointed when he thought that, after the next clump of foliage, it would surely open on him.

The landscape described in these lines is not, however, necessarily mountainous; the wheel grinding the corn suggests rather that it is not far from the lowlands; but Ruskin's general love of nature concentrated itself, in later boyhood, into that passion for mountains which we have already found attested in his own words. I am privileged to possess a small volume in which his early poems were printed for circulation among his relatives and friends. They form, in a striking degree, an autobiographical introduction to his prose works. The first in the series, written when he was fourteen, expresses the lyric passion and longing of the writer for mountains. This is the first

verse:

I

weary for the torrent leaping

From off the scaur's rough crest;

My muse is on the mountain sleeping,

My harp is sunk to rest.

It is profoundly touching, at the present moment, to find that already he has been impressed by Coniston.*

The crags are lone on Coniston,

And Loweswater's dell;

And dreary on the mighty one,

The cloud-enwreathed Scawfell.

The hand of the great describer is now beginning to make itself still more distinctly felt than in the Glen Farg verses. I long to tread the mountain-head

Above the valley swelling;

I long to feel the breezes sped

From grey and gaunt Helvellyn.

* At the time when these words were written Mr. Ruskin lay dangerously ill at Brantwood, Coniston.

I love the eddying circling sweep,
The mantling and the foam

Of murmuring waters dark and deep,
Amid the valleys lone.

The boy who wrote this last verse was father of the man that could do justice to the rich, brown, transparent water, circling and wreathing in long eddies, under the high cliff in Turner's Bolton Abbey! The closing verse in the poem. goes far to explain why Ruskin became the greatest literary delineator of mountains in Europe.

There is a thrill of strange delight

That passes quivering o'er me,
When blue hills rise upon the sight

Like summer clouds before me.

In these boyish poems we meet, as is usual in juvenile poetry, with many echoes from the poets in whom the boy delights. The influence of Scott is traceable everywhere, in light sunny sketching of landscape, and vivid observation of man and his works. In a fragment from a metrical journal recording the occurrences of what seems to have been Ruskin's first visit to the Continent, we find him looking from the crest of Ehrenbreitstein upon the city of Coblentz, the junction of the Rhine and the Moselle, the old stone bridge, the bridge of boats, and the rafts of pine-wood floating down the river.

We climbed the crag, we scaled the ridge,

On Coblentz looked adown;

The tall red roofs, the long white bridge,

And on the eye-like frown

Of the portals of her palaces,

And on her people's busy press.

There never was a fairer town,

Between two rivers as it lay,

Whence morning mist was curling gray
On the plain's edge beside the hill:-
Oh! it was lying calm and still

In morning's chastened glow: