91. Here is a perfect type, though not a complex one, of Gothic landscape; the background gold, the trees drawn leaf by leaf, and full green in color—no effect of light. Here is an equally typical Greek-school landscape, by Wilson—lost wholly in golden mist; the trees so slightly drawn that you don't know if they are trees or towers, and no care for color whatever; perfectly deceptive and marvelous effect of sunshine through the mist—"Apollo and the Python." Now here is Raphael, exactly between the two—trees still drawn leaf by leaf, wholly formal; but beautiful mist coming gradually into the distance. Well, then, last, here is Turner's; Greek-school of the highest class; and you define his art, absolutely, as first the displaying intensely, and with the sternest intellect, of natural form as it is, and then the envelopment of it with cloud and fire. Only, there are two sorts of cloud and fire. He knows them both. There's one, and there's another—the "Dudley" and the "Flint." That's what the cloud and flame of the dragon mean: now, let me show you what the dragon means himself.

92. I go back to another perfect landscape of the living Gothic school. It is only a pencil outline, by Edward Burne-Jones, in illustration of the story of Psyche; it is the introduction of Psyche, after all her troubles, into heaven.

Now in this of Burne-Jones, the landscape is clearly full of light everywhere, color or glass light: that is, the outline is prepared for modification of color only. Every plant in the grass is set formally, grows perfectly, and may be realized completely. Exquisite order, and universal, with eternal life and light, this is the faith and effort of the schools of Crystal; and you may describe and complete their work quite literally by taking any verses of Chaucer in his tender mood, and observing how he insists on the clearness and brightness first, and then on the order. Thus, in Chaucer's "Dream":

"Within an yle me thought I was,
Where wall and yate was all of glasse,
And so was closed round about
That leavelesse none come in ne out,
Uncouth and straunge to beholde,
For every yate of fine golde
A thousand fanes, aie turning,
Entuned had, and briddes singing
Divers, and on each fane a paire
With open mouth again here;
And of a sute were all the toures
Subtily corven after floures,
Of uncouth colors during aye
That never been none seene in May."

93. Next to this drawing of Psyche I place two of Turner's most beautiful classical landscapes. At once you are out of the open daylight, either in sunshine admitted partially through trembling leaves, or in the last rays of its setting, scarcely any more warm on the darkness of the ilex wood. In both, the vegetation, though beautiful, is absolutely wild and uncared for, as it seems, either by human or by higher powers, which, having appointed for it the laws of its being, leave it to spring into such beauty as is consistent with disease and alternate with decay.

ÆSACUS AND HESPERIE.

From the painting by Turner.

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In the purest landscape, the human subject is the immortality of the soul by the faithfulness of love: in both the Turner landscapes it is the death of the body by the impatience and error of love. The one is the first glimpse of Hesperia to [Æsacus]:[13]