Modern Painters, Volume 1 |
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Common terms and phrases
Academy pictures Alps appear architecture artist beauty blue boughs Canaletto CHAPTER character chiaroscuro Claude clouds colour Copley Fielding curves Cuyp dark degree delicate distance distinct drawing Dulwich edge effect engraver especially evidence excellence expression exquisite false farther feeling foliage foreground Gallery Gentile Bellini give given grey hills idea of imitation ideas of truth impossible impression instance Italy J. M. W. Turner kind knowledge Land's End landscape art less Leucippus light and shade lines look mass means mind mist modern mountain nature never Nicholas Poussin objects observed old masters outline painting particular peculiar perception perfect picture pleasure Poussin principles pure qualities rain-cloud receive reflection rendering respect ripple Rivers of France rocks Salvator seen shadow space Stanfield sublime surface thing thought Titian tone touch transparent trees Turner vapour Venice visible waves whole
Popular passages
Page 420 - Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith that all which we behold Is...
Page 337 - I am afraid my uncle will think himself justified by them on this occasion, when he asserts, that it is one of the most difficult things in the world to put a woman right, when she sets out wrong.
Page 202 - All has passed, unregretted as unseen; or if the apathy be ever shaken off, even for an instant, it is only by what is gross, or what is extraordinary; and yet it is not in the broad and fierce manifestations of the elemental energies, not in the clash of the hail, nor the drift of the whirlwind, that the highest characters of the sublime are developed. God is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still, small voice.
Page 41 - Then shall they begin to say to the mountains ; Fall on us ; and to the hills ; Cover us.
Page 249 - But here — above, around, below, On mountain or in glen, Nor tree nor shrub, nor plant, nor flower, Nor aught of vegetative power The weary eye may ken. For all is rocks at random thrown, Black waves, bare crags, and banks of stone...
Page 201 - it is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which Nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him, and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her.
Page 202 - And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a subject of thought, but as it has to do with our animal sensations; we look upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon all which bears witness to the...
Page 202 - If in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena do we speak of? One says it has been wet; and another, it has been windy; and another, it has been warm.
Page xxxvii - The earth yields and crumbles beneath his foot, tread he never so lightly, for its substance is white, hollow, and carious, like the dusty wreck of the bones of men. The long knotted grass waves and tosses feebly in the evening wind, and the shadows of its motion shake feverishly along the banks of ruin that lift themselves to the sunlight; hillocks of mouldering earth heave around him, as if the dead beneath were struggling in their sleep...
Page 153 - It had been wild weather when I left Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds were sweeping in sulphurous blue, with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking gleams of sun along the Claudian aqueduct lighting up the infinity of its arches like the bridge of chaos.