His excellence in color was remarkable. This seeming mystery, which is a distinguishing characteristic of artists in different schools, periods, and countries, is not unlike that of language in literature. Color is to the painter what words are to the author; and as the writers of one age or place arrive at a peculiar mastery in language, so do artists excel in color. It would be difficult to account satisfactorily for the rich idiom suddenly assumed by our English tongue in the contemporaneous prose of Sidney, Hooker, and Bacon, and in the unapproached affluence of Shakespeare. It might be as difficult to account for the unequalled tints which shone on the canvas of Tintoretto, Paul Veronese, and Titian, masters of what is called the Venetian School. Ignorance has sometimes referred these glories to concealed or lost artistic rules in combinations of color, not thinking that they can be traced only to a native talent for color, prompted into activity by circumstances difficult at this late period to determine. As some possess a peculiar, untaught felicity and copiousness of words without accurate knowledge of grammar, so there are artists excelling in rich and splendid color, but ignorant of drawing, and, on the other hand, accurate drawing is sometimes coldly clad in unsatisfactory color. Allston was largely endowed by Nature with the talent for color, which was strongly developed under the influence of Italian art. While in Rome, he was remarked for his excellence in this respect, and received from German painters there the flattering title of "American Titian." Critics of authority have said that the clearness and vigor of his color approached that of the elder masters.[174] Rich and harmonious as the verses of the "Faëry Queen," it was uniformly soft, mellow, and appropriate, without the garish brilliancy of the modern French School, calling to mind the saying of the blind man, that red resembles the notes of a trumpet. [174] Bunsen, Beschreibung der Stadt Rom, Band I. p. 588. Article on _Modern Art_, by K. Platner. He affected no secret or mystery in the preparation of colors. What he knew he was ready to impart: his genius he could not impart. With simple pigments, accessible to all alike, he reproduced, with glowing brush, the tints of Nature. All that his eyes looked upon furnished a lesson. The flowers of the field, the foliage of the forest, the sunset glories of our western horizon, the transparent azure above, the blackness of the storm, the soft gray of twilight, the haze of an Indian summer, the human countenance animate with thought, and that finest color in Nature, according to the ancient Greek, the blush of ingenuous youth,--these were the sources from which he drew. With a discerning spirit he mixed them on his palette, and with the eye of sympathy saw them again on his canvas.