95. You remember I told you how the earthly power that is necessary in art was shown by the flight of Daedalus to the [Greek: herpeton] Minos. Look for yourselves at the story of Procris as related to Minos in the fifteenth chapter of the third book of Apollodorus; and you will see why it is a Faun who is put to wonder at her, she having escaped by artifice from the Bestial power of Minos. Yet she is wholly an earth-nymph, and the son of Aurora must not only leave her, but himself slay her; the myth of Semele desiring to see Zeus, and of Apollo and Coronis, and this having all the same main interest. Once understand that, and you will see why Turner has put her death under this deep shade of trees, the sun withdrawing his last ray; and why he has put beside her the low type of an animal's pain, a dog licking its wounded paw. 96. But now, I want you to understand Turner's depth of sympathy farther still. In both these high mythical subjects the surrounding nature, though suffering, is still dignified and beautiful. Every line in which the master traces it, even where seemingly negligent, is lovely, and set down with a meditative calmness which makes these two etchings capable of being placed beside the most tranquil work of Holbein or Duerer. In this "Cephalus" especially, note the extreme equality and serenity of every outline. But now here is a subject of which you will wonder at first why Turner drew it at all. It has no beauty whatsoever, no specialty of picturesqueness; and all its lines are cramped and poor. The crampness and the poverty are all intended. This is no longer to make us think of the death of happy souls, but of the labor of unhappy ones; at least, of the more or less limited, dullest, and--I must not say homely, but--unhomely life of the neglected agricultural poor. It is a gleaner bringing down her one sheaf of corn to an old watermill, itself mossy and rent, scarcely able to get its stones to turn. An ill-bred dog stands, joyless, by the unfenced stream; two country boys lean, joyless, against a wall that is half broken down; and all about the steps down which the girl is bringing her sheaf, the bank of earth, flowerless and rugged, testifies only of its malignity; and in the black and sternly rugged etching--no longer graceful, but hard, and broken in every touch--the master insists upon the ancient curse of the earth--"Thorns also and Thistles shall it bring forth to thee." 97. And now you will see at once with what feeling Turner completes, in a more tender mood, this lovely subject of his Yorkshire stream, by giving it the conditions of pastoral and agricultural life; the cattle by the pool, the milkmaid crossing the bridge with her pail on her head, the mill with the old millstones, and its gleaming weir as his chief light led across behind the wild trees. [Illustration: MILL NEAR GRANDE CHARTREUSE. From the painting by Turner.]