Gilpin’s language is often borrowed from the art of painting. He calls the steep banks of rivers “side screens;” the changing view before him as he floats down the river is a “front screen.” He is always talking about foregrounds and backgrounds and perspective and composition. He says that Nature is great in design, an admirable colorist, and that she harmonizes tints with infinite variety and beauty. But, he adds, she is seldom so correct in composition as to produce a harmonious whole. Either the foreground or the background is disproportioned, or some awkward line runs through the piece; or a tree is ill placed, or a bank is formal; or something or other is not as it should be. With his sense of form Gilpin has also an unusual sensitiveness to color, and to varieties of light and shade. The following description of a sunset is typical: The sun was now descending low, and cast the broad shades of evening athwart the landscape, while his beams, gleaming with yellow lustre through the valleys, spread over the inlightened summits of the mountains a thousand lovely tints--in sober harmony where some deep recess was faintly shadowed--in splendid hue where jutting knolls or promontories received fuller radiance of the diverging ray. The air was still. The lake, one vast expanse of crystal mirror. The mountain shadows, which sometimes give the water a deep, black hue (in many circumstances extremely picturesque) were softened here into a mild blue tint which swept over half the surface. The other half received the fair impression of every radiant form that glowed around. The inverted landscape was touched in fainter colours than the real one. Yet it was more than _laid in_. It was almost finished. What an admirable study for the pallet is such a scene as this! “No one can paint a country properly,” he says, “unless he has seen it in various lights.” The local variations caused by the weather, the time of day, the time of year, “cannot be too much attended to by all lovers of landscape.” “Every landscape is seen best under _some peculiar_ illumination.” He has always the painter’s eye for fogs, mist, haze, soft coloring, atmosphere.