For it does not need to be said that Turner, with his marked individuality, could have no influence on the further development of English painting. The dramatic fervour of Romanticism was here expressed just as little as Classicism. It was only the poets who fled into the wilderness of nature, and sang the splendour and the mysteries of the mountains, the lightning and the storm, the might of the elements. In painting there is no counterpart to Scott's descriptions of the Highlands or Wordsworth's rhapsodies upon the English lakes, or to the tendency of landscape painting which was represented in Germany by Lessing and Blechen. Wordsworth is majestic and sublime, and English painting lovely and full of intimate emotion. It knows neither ancient Alpine castles nor the sunsets of Greece. Turner, as a solitary exception, represented nature stately, terrible, stormy, glorious, mighty, grand, and sublime; all the others, like Gainsborough, loved simplicity, modest grace, and virginal quietude. England has nothing romantic. At the very time when Lessing painted his landscapes, Ludwig Tieck experienced a bitter disappointment when he trod the soil where Shakespeare wrote the witch scenes in _Macbeth_. A sombre, melancholy, primæval maze was what he had expected, and there lay before him a soft, luxuriant, and cultivated country. What distinguishes English landscape is a singular luxuriance, an almost unctuous wealth of vegetation. Drive through the country on a bright day on the top of a coach, and look around you; in all directions as far as the eye can reach an endless green carpet is spread over gentle valleys and undulating hills; cereals, vegetables, clover, hops, and glorious meadows with high rich grasses stretch forth; here and there stand a group of mighty oaks flinging their shadows wide, and around are pastures hemmed in by hedges, where splendid cattle lie chewing the cud. The moist atmosphere surrounds the trees and plants like a shining vapour. There is nothing more charming in the world, and nothing more delicate than these tones of colour; one might stand for hours looking at the clouds of satin, the fine ærial bloom, and the soft transparent gauze which catches the sunbeams in its silver net, softens them, and sends them smiling and toying to the earth. On both sides of the carriage the fields extend, each more beautiful than the last, in constant succession, interwoven with broad patches of buttercups, daisies, and meadowsweet. A strange magic, a loveliness so exquisite that it is well-nigh painful, escapes from this inexhaustible vegetation. The drops sparkle on the leaves like pearls, the arched tree-tops murmur in the gentle breeze. Luxuriantly they thrive in these airy glades, where they are ever rejuvenated and bedewed by the moist air of the sea. And the sky seems to have been made to enliven the colours of the land. At the tiniest sunbeam the earth smiles with a delicious charm, and the bells of flowers unfold in rich,