conversation involved consideration of scenery under other than the
favorite character, he was prone to silence, or to attempts to change
the subject. Yet he has been known to speak in terms of commendation
of certain sunrises, and once was actually caught by a friend making a
sketch of Pilatus at sunrise across the Lake of Lucerne.

The objects in the immediate foreground shared in the neglect which
attached to certain seasons. They were ignored as organized members of
what should be a living foreground, and their places were concealed by
unintelligible pigment. As to life there, he wanted none: light,--light
that gleams, and color to reflect it, were his aim. As an inevitable
attending result of these principles, or practices, the structure of the
whole landscape was ambiguous. The essential line and point were evaded,
and one perceived that the artist had _watched_ far more attentively
than he had studied Nature.

At the same time the pictures produced in this studio were marked by
qualities of great beauty. The peculiarly ethereal character of the vast
bands of thin vapors made visible by the slant rays of the sun, and
illuminated with tints which are exquisitely pure and prismatic, was
rendered with surprising success. On examination, the tints which were
used to represent the prismatic character of those of Nature were found
to present surfaces of such excessive delicacy, that the evanescence of
the natural phenomena was suggested, and apprehensions were indulged as
to the permanency of the effects. That noble north light of a cloudless
Roman sky did not extend far, hardly to Civita Vecchia, certainly not
to England, Old or New; and with a less friendly hand than his own to
expose his work, under sight still less kind, there might be presented a
picture bereft of all but its faults. Such has been the case.