[1] The word in the uppermost note, to the right of the sun, is "red;" the others, "yellow," "purple," "cold" light gray. He always noted the colors of the skies in this way. [2] It is not so good a facsimile as those I have given from Durer, for the original sketch is in light pencil; and the thickening and delicate emphasis of the lines, on which nearly all the beauty of the drawing depended, cannot be expressed in the woodcut, though marked by a double line as well as I could. But the figure will answer its purpose well enough in showing Turner's mode of sketching. [3] Thus, in the Holy Family of Titian, lately purchased for the National Gallery, the piece of St. Catherine's dress over her shoulders is painted on the under dress, after that was dry. All its value would have been lost, had the slightest tint or trace of it been given previously. This picture, I think, and certainly many of Tintoret's, are painted on dark grounds; but this is to save time, and with some loss to the future brightness of the color. [4] In cleaning the "Hero and Leander," now in the National collection, these upper glazes were taken off, and only the black ground left. I remember the picture when its distance was of the most exquisite blue. I have no doubt the "Fire at Sea" has had its distance destroyed in the same manner. PART IX. OF IDEAS OF RELATION:--II. OF INVENTION SPIRITUAL. CHAPTER I. THE DARK MIRROR. § 1. In the course of our inquiry into the moral of landscape (Vol. III., chap. 17), we promised, at the close of our work, to seek for some better, or at least clearer, conclusions than were then possible to us. We confined ourselves in that chapter to the vindication of the probable utility of the _love_ of natural scenery. We made no assertion of the usefulness of _painting_ such scenery. It might be well to delight in the real country, or admire the real flowers and true mountains. But it did not follow that it was advisable to paint them. Far from it. Many reasons might be given why we should not paint them. All the purposes of good which we saw that the beauty of nature could accomplish, may be better fulfilled by the meanest of her realities than by the brightest of imitations. For prolonged entertainment, no picture can be compared with the wealth of interest which may be found in the herbage of the poorest field, or blossoms of the narrowest copse. As suggestive of supernatural power, the passing away of a fitful rain-cloud, or opening of dawn, are in their change and mystery more pregnant than any pictures. A child would, I suppose, receive a religious lesson from a flower more willingly than from a print of one, and might be taught to understand the nineteenth Psalm, on a starry night, better than by diagrams of the constellations. Whence it might seem a waste of time to draw landscape at all.