[50] It would be utterly vain to attempt any general account of the works of this painter, unless I were able also to give abstract of the subtlest mythologies of Greek worship and Christian romance. Besides, many of his best designs are pale pencil drawings like Florentine engravings, of which the delicacy is literally invisible, and the manner irksome, to a public trained among the black scrabblings of modern wood-cutter's and etcher's prints. I will only say that the single series of these pencil-drawings, from the story of Psyche, which I have been able to place in the schools of Oxford, together with the two colored beginnings from the stories of Jason and Alcestis, are, in my estimate, quite the most precious gift, not excepting even the Loire series of Turners, in the ratified acceptance of which my University has honored with some fixed memorial the aims of her first Art-Teacher. [51] _Lectures on Art_, Sec.Sec. 95-6.--ED. * * * * * ART. III. ARCHITECTURE. THE OPENING OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE. (_Pamphlet, 1854._) THE STUDY OF ARCHITECTURE IN OUR SCHOOLS. (_R.I.B.A. Transactions, 1865._) * * * * * THE OPENING OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE.[52] 253. I read the account in the _Times_ newspaper of the opening of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham as I ascended the hill between Vevay and Chatel St. Denis, and the thoughts which it called up haunted me all day long as my road wound among the grassy slopes of the Simmenthal. There was a strange contrast between the image of that mighty palace, raised so high above the hills on which it is built as to make them seem little else than a basement for its glittering stateliness, and those lowland huts, half hidden beneath their coverts of forest, and scattered like gray stones along the masses of far-away mountain. Here man contending with the power of Nature for his existence; there commanding them for his recreation; here a feeble folk nested among the rocks with the wild goat and the coney, and retaining the same quiet thoughts from generation to generation; there a great multitude triumphing in the splendor of immeasurable habitation, and haughty with hope of endless progress and irresistible power.