I cannot express to you how strange--how more and more strange every day--it seems to me, that I cannot find a single drawing, nor definite account, of scenes so memorable as this, to point you to; but must guess and piece their image together for you as best I can from their Swiss similitudes. No English gentleman can pass through public school-life without knowing his Trachiniæ; yet I believe, literally, we could give better account of the forms of the mountains in the moon, than we could of Œta. And what has art done to help us? How many Skiddaws or Benvenues, for one Œta,--if one! And when the English gentleman becomes an art-patron, he employs his painter-servant only to paint himself and his house; and when Turner was striving, in his youth, to enforce the mythology, and picture these very scenes in Greece, and putting his whole strength into the endeavour to conceive them, the noble pictures remained in his gallery; and for bread, he had to paint ---- Hall, the seat of ----, Esquire, with the carriage drive, the summer-house, and the squire going out hunting. If, indeed, the squire would make his seat worth painting, and would stay there, and would make the seats, or, shall we call them, forms, of his peasantry, worth painting too, he would be interpreting the fable of the Halcyon to purpose. But you must, at once, and without any interpreter, feel for yourselves how much is implied in those wonderful words of Simonides--written six hundred years before Christ;--"when in the wild winter months, Zeus gives the _wisdom of calm_;" and how much teaching there is for us in the imagination of past days,--this dream-picture of what is true in days that are, and are to come,--that perfect domestic love not only makes its nest upon the waves, but that the waves will be calm that it may. 200. True, I repeat, for all ages, and all people, that, indeed, are desirous of peace, and loving in trouble! But what fable shall we invent, what creature on earth or sea shall we find, to symbolize this state of ours in modern England? To what sorrowful birds shall _we_ be likened, who make the principal object of our lives dispeace, and unrest; and turn our wives and daughters out of their nests, to work for themselves? Nay, strictly speaking, we have not even got so much as nests to turn them out of. I was infinitely struck, only the other day, by the saying of a large landed proprietor (a good man, who was doing all he could for his tenantry, and building new cottages for them), that the best he _could_ do for them, under present conditions of wages, and the like, was, to give them good drainage and bare walls. "I am obliged," he said to me, "to give up all thought of anything artistic, and even then, I must lose a considerable sum on every cottage I build."