It was many years before any other artist so well illustrated Blake’s phrase, “Great things are done when men and mountains meet,”[615] as did Wilson. For fifteen impressionable years he had lived in North Wales and his mind and heart had been insensibly affected by the sublimity of mountain scenes. Wales had given as important and effective tutelage to him as did the Lake District to the youthful Wordsworth sixty years later. Wilson is reported to have said that Wales “afforded every requisite for a landscape painter” but we need no testimony beyond his pictures to show with what power these rugged cliffs and deep ravines, these silent lakes and tarns, these tumultuous streams and waterfalls, these lonely mountain masses towering into the sky, spoke to him both as an artist and as a man when, in mature life with mature power, he returned to the land of his birth. He painted Welsh scenes with boldness and freedom, with grandeur, dignity, and impressiveness, and with a power of divination that must put him high in the ranks of painters of mountain scenery in any age.[616] In one characteristic Wilson’s Italian and Welsh pictures are alike. He was temperamentally susceptible to the pathos of ruins. His Italian pictures are steeped in a sense of inescapable sadness. Through the loveliness of Nature runs the mournful memory of fallen grandeur, of races who have lived and loved and are no more. But the ruined strongholds and castles of his own land touched him even more deeply. The bright stillness of Kilgarren Castle on its rocky cliff, mirrored in the smooth surface of the river below, is more beautiful and more subtly suggestive of “old, unhappy, far-off things” than are the Italian pictures. Through all Wilson’s pictures we feel, furthermore, a quality of genuineness in both observation and feeling. He studied the great masters of landscape, but not as a copyist. He compared their work with Nature which he studied for himself. Ruskin says of him, Here, at last, we feel, is an honest Englishman, who has got away out of all the Camere, and the Loggie, and the Stanze, and the schools, and the Disputas ... and has laid himself down with His own poor eyes and heart, and the sun casting his light between ruins--possessor, he, of so much of the evidently blessed peace of things--he and the poor lizard in the cranny of the stones beside him.[617] Mr. Beaumont Fletcher in developing this conception of Wilson as one able to see with his own eyes, very justly points out that his idealism, even in the Italian pictures, is based on a singularly close representation of the facts of Nature. Even Sir Joshua Reynolds when he objects to Wilson’s use of classical figures incidentally testifies to the truth of his landscapes which are, says Sir Joshua, “too near common nature to admit the supernatural.”[618]