Gents Mag 1843 part 2 p.468

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	Gentleman's Magazine 1843 part 2 p.468 and which gives him an undisputed eminence over all his competitors; we should allow, and gladly, the maigical effects of his pencil in the most difficult and daring compositions, - the skilfulness and success of his combinations, - the extent of his resources, - the astonishing brilliancy of his colouring, - his imaginative powers, - his creative thought; and we should not deny that in the power of seizing and describing some of the most awfull and appalling scenes on which the human eye can gaze, when nature herself seems gasping in the throes and convulsions of elemental wrath, in the black and brooding tempest, in the ocean maddened into fury, and the sky robed with thunder, and threatening ruin and destruction; - in such scenes the old masters must yield all attempt at competition; but we also believe that these were effects which they, for adequate reasons, considered it not judicious to represent, and which they avoided, not because they were unable to pourtray them, but because they considered them unsuitable to their design, and unfitted to the principles of their art. The mind is affected by the impressions made on it, as the landscape is by the shadows that pass across its bosom; if these impressions are too powerfully drawn, they are liable, after a certain time, to lose their attraction, and subsequently pass away in langour and indifference. Permanent pleasure is derived from the gentle impulse of soft and agreeable emotions rising without effort, and succeeding each other without distraction. We also should agree with the author of this work in his assertion that in his acquaintance with the different forms of nature, as the various strata of the earth and the shapes which they assume, - the varieties of clouds, the peculiarities of foliage, - Turner excelled the masters of the Italian school - just as the poets of the present day surpass the ancients in their descriptions of the individual forms of natural objects. In this point the Seasons of Thomson are far more graphic and exact than the Georgics of Virgil, or the Eclogues of Theocritus; bit it was not because the ancient poets had no eye to observe, or no power to describe, but because they adopted and maintained certain principles which did not admit this mere transcript of natural imagery into their works of imagination. Nature, and the forms of nature, when they appear in the descriptive passages of the ancient poets, do not as seen in the transparent mirror of absolute truth, which every minute delineation that can realize the object; but as reflected back from the hearrt of man, accompanied and modified and changed by the associations and images lent to them from the mind, and which give them an impressive power and interest that is not their own. All art, whether poetical or pictorial, becomes more and more descriptive as it advances. Such is the fact; but the causes of this change and movement, though not difficult to investigate, lie beyond our present scope and purpose; and we must therefore hasten to conclude, by saying, that comparing the ancient masters to Turner, as the great leader and example of the moderns, the object they have respectively in view does not appear the same; the latter manifesting their great acquirements in their art, and their pictorial powers, by producing the most forcible impressions on the mind from different aspects of nature, and comprehending everything, from the greatest to the minutest object, that can lend them assistance; and thus, as it were, filling the mind of the spectator with great impressions, that he has passively to receive. The ancient painters appear to us rather to endeavour to act on the mind by calling out its own activity; by suggesting some leading ideas to be pursued by it into minuter investigations; by awakening associations connected with general forms and objects; by
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