"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. [Illustration: AESACUS AND HESPERIE. From the painting by Turner.] 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 AEsacus:[13] "Aspicit Hesperien patria Cebrenida ripa, Injectos humeris siccantem sole capillos:" in a few moments to lose her forever. The other is a mythological subject of deeper meaning, the death of Procris. [Footnote 13: Ovid, "Metamorphoses," XI. 769.] 94. I just now referred to the landscape by John Bellini in the National Gallery as one of the six best existing of the purist school, being wholly felicitous and enjoyable. In the foreground of it indeed is the martyrdom of Peter Martyr; but John Bellini looks upon that as an entirely cheerful and pleasing incident; it does not disturb or even surprise him, much less displease in the slightest degree. Now, the next best landscape[14] to this, in the National Gallery, is a Florentine one on the edge of transition to the Greek feeling; and in that the distance is still beautiful, but misty, not clear; the flowers are still beautiful, but--intentionally--of the color of blood; and in the foreground lies the dead body of Procris, which disturbs the poor painter greatly; and he has expressed his disturbed mind about it in the figure of a poor little brown--nearly black--Faun, or perhaps the god Faunus himself, who is much puzzled by the death of Procris, and stoops over her, thinking it a woeful thing to find her pretty body lying there breathless, and all spotted with blood on the breast. [Footnote 14: (Of the Purist school.)]