These drawings of 1776 are remarkable in the history not only of English water-colour painting and English art, but in the history of landscape painting of all time. They are the first successful[640] attempt to give a true impression of Alpine scenery. From the first Cozens seems to have found his way to render its character, to convey the grandeur of its snow-crowned peaks, the depth of its valleys, the solitude of its lakes, the appearance of its slopes, “fledged,” as Shelley sang, “with pines,” the sun striking through the gorges on high-perched cot, or village, the chill of the shaded hollows filled with mist, the cloaks of cloud about the shoulders of the hills,--and all this not in a pretty conventional or a grand conventional manner, but with a style that was Nature’s own.... His mountains look their height, and suggest their bulk and weight.[641] Cozens was in England again by 1779. A second visit to Italy with Mr. Beckford ended in 1783 and resulted like the first tour in a large number of water-color drawings. Mr. Thornbury comments on a view of a glacier valley executed at this time as “worthy of all praise for its multitudinousness, breadth, and grand, harmonious simplicity, as well as for the dazzling purity of its colour.”[642] Constable said of Cozens that he was “all poetry,” and that “he was the greatest genius that ever touched landscape;” and Turner said that from Cozens’ “Hannibal Crossing the Alps” (1776) he had learned more than from anything he had before seen.[643] Thomas Girtin (1775–1802) had a short life but he came early to the maturity of his genius. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1794 to 1801. In about 1796 he went to the north of England and to Scotland with James Moore, and there “made many sketches of pure landscape, recording the grand effects of light and shade upon the swelling moors and rolling downs, with a breadth and simplicity and a large regard to truth never equalled before.”[644] In the South Kensington Gallery are many water-colors by Girtin that show his excellent drawing and his skill in the use of color. Four Yorkshire views, a “Coast Scene,” and three river scenes well illustrate the truth and vigor with which he represented landscape. Mr. Ruskin said of Girtin’s work, “He is often as impressive to me as Nature herself; nor do I doubt that Turner owed more to his teaching and companionship than to his own genius in the first years of his life.”[645] [Illustration: THE WOOD CUTTERS _By George Morland_]