glade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven, opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as sheet lightning opens in a cloud at sunset; the motionless masses of dark rock--dark though flushed with scarlet lichen--casting their quiet shadows across its restless radiance, the fountain underneath them filling its marble hollow with blue mist and fitful sound, and over all--the multitudinous bars of amber and rose, the _sacred_ clouds that have no _darkness_, and only exist to illumine, were seen in fathomless intervals between the solemn and _orbed_ repose of the stone pines, passing to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding lustre of the measureless line where the Campagna melted into the blaze of the sea." In verity, this is no "Campana Supellex." It is a riddle! Is he going up or down hill--or both at once? No human being can tell. He did not like the "sulphur and treacle" of "our Scotch connoisseurs;" but what colours has he not added here to his sulphur--colours, too, that we fear for the "idea of truth" cannot coexist! And how, in the name of optics, could it be possible for any painter to take in all this, with the "_fathomless intervals_," into an angle of vision of forty-five degrees? It is quite superfluous to ask "who is likest this, Turner or Poussin?" There immediately follows a remark upon another picture in the National Gallery, the "Mercury and Woodman," by Salvator Rosa, than which nothing can be more untrue to the original. He asserts that Salvator painted the distant mountains, "throughout, without one instant of variation. But what is its colour? _Pure_ sky-blue, without one grain of grey, or any modifying hue whatsoever;--the same brush which had just given the bluest parts of the sky, has been more loaded at the same part of the pallette, and the whole mountain throw in with unmitigated ultramarine." Now the fact is, that the picture has, in this part, been so injured, that it is hard to say what colour is under the dirty brown-asphaltum hue and texture that covers it. It is certainly not blue now, not "pure blue"--unless pictures change like the cameleon. We know the picture well, and have seen another of the same subject, where the mountains have variety, and yet are blue. We believe a great sum was given for this picture--far more than its condition justifies. We must return--we left the graduate discussing ideas of truth. There is a chapter to show that the truth of nature is not to be discerned by the uneducated senses. As we do not perceive all sounds that enter the ear, so do we not perceive all that is cognizable by the eye--we have, that is, a power of nullifying an impression; that this habit is so common, that from the abstraction of their minds to other subjects, there are probably persons who never saw any thing beautiful. Sensibility to the power of beauty is required--and to see rightly, there should be a perfect state of moral feeling. Even when we think