darker than the sky round it! Thus Mr. Gould, though a professed naturalist, and passing most of his life in the open air, over and over again, in his 'British Birds,' draws the setting sun dark on the sky!
5
'Like the blood he predicts.'—The astrological power of the planet Mars was of course ascribed to it in the same connection with its red color. The reader may be interested to see the notice, in 'Modern Painters,' of Turner's constant use of the same symbol; partly an expression of his own personal feeling, partly, the employment of a symbolic language known to all careful readers of solar and stellar tradition.
"He was very definitely in the habit of indicating the association of any subject with circumstances of death, especially the death of multitudes, by placing it under one of his most deeply
"The color of blood is thus plainly taken for the leading tone in the storm-clouds above the 'Slave-ship.' It occurs with similar distinctness in the much earlier picture of 'Ulysses and Polypheme,' in that of 'Napoleon at St. Helena,' and, subdued by softer hues, in the 'Old Téméraire.'
"The sky of this Goldau is, in its scarlet and crimson, the deepest in tone of all that I know in Turner's drawings.
"Another feeling, traceable in several of his former works, is an acute sense of the contrast between the careless interests and idle pleasures of daily life, and the state of those whose time for labor, or knowledge, or delight, is passed forever. There is evidence of this feeling in the introduction of the boys at play in the churchyard of Kirkby Lonsdale, and the boy climbing for his kite among the thickets above the little mountain churchyard of Brignal-bank; it is in the same tone of thought that he has placed here the two figures fishing, leaning against these shattered flanks of rock,—the sepulchral stones of the great mountain Field of Death."
6
'Thy lore unto calamity.'—It is, I believe, recognized by all who have in any degree become interested in the traditions of Chaldean astrology, that its warnings were distinct,—its promises deceitful. Horace thus warns Leuconoe against reading the Babylonian numbers to learn the time of her death,—he does not imply their promise of previous happiness; and the continually deceptive character of the Delphic oracle itself, tempted always rather to fatal than to fortunate conduct, unless the inquirer were more than wise in his reading. Byron gathers into the bitter question all the sorrow of former superstition, while in the lines italicized, just above, he sums in the briefest and plainest English, all that we yet know, or may wisely think, about the Sun. It is the '
7
'More beautiful in that variety.'—This line, with the one italicized beneath, expresses in Myrrha's mind, the feeling which I said, in the outset, every thoughtful watcher of heaven necessarily had in those old days; whereas now, the variety is for the most part, only in modes of disagreeableness; and the vapor, instead of adding light to the unclouded sky, takes away the aspect and destroys the functions of sky altogether.
8
'Steam out of an engine funnel.'—Compare the sixth paragraph of Professor Tyndall's 'Forms of Water,' and the following seventh one, in which the phenomenon of transparent steam becoming opaque is thus explained. "Every bit of steam shrinks, when chilled, to a much more minute particle of water. The liquid particles thus produced form a kind of water dust of exceeding fineness, which floats in the air, and is called a cloud."
But the author does not tell us, in the first place, what is the shape or nature of a 'bit of steam,' nor, in the second place, how the contraction of the individual bits of steam is effected without any diminution of the whole mass of them, but on the contrary, during its steady
In its wider range that problem embraces the total mystery of volatile power in substance; and of the visible states consequent on sudden—and presumably, therefore, imperfect—vaporization; as the smoke of frankincense, or the sacred fume of modern devotion which now fills the inhabited world, as that of the rose and violet its deserts. What,—it would be useful to know, is the actual bulk of an atom of orange perfume?—what of one of vaporized tobacco, or gunpowder?—and where do
All these questions were put, closely and precisely, four-and-twenty years ago, in the 1st chapter of the 7th part of 'Modern Painters,' paragraphs 4 to 9, of which I can here allow space only for the last, which expresses the final difficulties of the matter better than anything said in this lecture:—
"But farther: these questions of volatility, and visibility, and hue, are all complicated with those of shape. How is a cloud outlined? Granted whatever you choose to ask, concerning its material, or its aspect, its loftiness and luminousness,—how of its limitation? What hews it into a heap, or spins it into a web? Cold is usually shapeless, I suppose, extending over large spaces equally, or with gradual diminution. You cannot have in the open air, angles, and wedges, and coils, and cliffs, of cold. Yet the vapor stops suddenly, sharp and steep as a rock, or thrusts itself across the gates of heaven in likeness of a brazen bar; or braids itself in and out, and across and across, like a tissue of tapestry; or falls into ripples, like sand; or into waving shreds and tongues, as fire. On what anvils and wheels is the vapor pointed, twisted, hammered, whirled, as the potter's clay? By what hands is the incense of the sea built up into domes of marble?"
9
The opposed conditions of the higher and lower orders of cloud, with the balanced intermediate one, are beautifully seen on mountain summits of rock or earth. On snowy ones they are far more complex: but on rock summits there are three distinct forms of attached cloud in serene weather; the first that of cloud veil laid over them, and
These three forms of cloud belong exclusively to calm weather; attached drift cloud, (see Note 11) can only be formed in the wind.
10
'Glaciers of the Alps,' page 10.—"Let a pound weight be placed upon a cube of granite" (size of supposed cube not mentioned), "the cube is flattened, though in an infinitesimal degree. Let the weight be removed, the cube remains a little flattened. Let us call the cube thus flattened No. 1. Starting with No. 1 as a new mass, let the pound weight be laid upon it. We have a more flattened mass, No. 2.... Apply this to squeezed rocks, to those, for example, which form the base of an obelisk like the Matterhorn,—the conclusion seems inevitable
11
'Glaciers of the Alps,' page 146.—"The sun was near the western horizon, and I remained alone upon the Grat to see his last beams illuminate the mountains, which, with one exception, were without a trace of cloud.
"This exception was the Matterhorn, the appearance of which was extremely instructive. The obelisk appeared to be divided in two halves by a vertical line, drawn from its summit half-way down, to the windward of which we had the bare cliffs of
