On the opposite side of the road is the Whitestone Pond, and here the visitor finds himself ‘High on bleak Hampstead’s swarthy moor,’ as Macaulay has it, a line all very well for poetical purposes, but by no means characteristic of Hampstead Heath, with its pure, etherized air, full of brightness on the least pretence of sunshine, and though bleak enough at this eminence with the wind at N.N.E., even balmy then in some one or other of its many walks and sheltered valleys. It is true that Gilchrist in his ‘Life of Blake’ speaks of the depth and monotony of the tints prevailing in the woods and fields about Hampstead. But Collins and Constable, Linnell, Leslie, and Landseer, and a host of later artists, have not found them so. To them the Heath, with its broken ground, varied herbage, and picturesque trees or groups of them, its splendid cloudscapes, its changeful lights and shadows, has proved an art school full of infinite variety and inexhaustible beauty. Here Collins came for his old trees, his undulating banks, ‘full of flowering grasses, and dark dock leaves,’ and the light and shade and reflections that delight us in his pictures. Here, too, he met his ‘Harvest Showers’ and ‘Blackberry-Gatherers,’ and just across the Heath, where we are going, is the scene of his ‘Taking out a Thorn’ (this picture is in the possession of Her Majesty). And Constable, he who never saw an ugly thing in his life, ‘for light and shade and perspective will make it beautiful,’[128] he, too, found by every hedge and in every lane treasures of form and tint, which Nature scatters broadcast, and therefore, to use his own words, ‘nobody thinks it worth while to pick them up’—we suppose because the miracle is too common to be generally noticed. Here he also studied the skies, and effects of light, shade and colour, the dews, the breeze, the storm, and made many a pictorial transcript from the vantage-ground of the Heath, now bright with sunshine, but more often under the aspect of drifting showers, for he seems to have loved the rain-laden, cloudy skies, and to have revelled in depicting them. Fuseli, when going to call on the artist, would cry out, ‘Give me an umbrella; I am going to see Constable’s pictures!’[129]