no longer arises.  The lines are drawn with a decision, with a sense of certainty, raising them above all doubt.  In the rendering of distant mountains, Mr. Dillon evinces new knowledge of what such forms necessarily imply,—­their tendency to monotone and to flatness, yet preserving all their essential surface markings, and their inevitable cutting outline against the sky,—­which sharpness Mr. Tilton as yet has only hinted at, not represented.  Positive edges are the true.—­But we have no further space to devote to these particulars of landscape form.  In these Mr. Tilton has many rivals and not a few superiors.

There is left us the pleasant privilege of alluding to an ability which we believe he shares with none, and which enables him to give his present pictures their great value.  This is the power to discriminate accurately between the several classes of color,—­the local, the reflected, and the prismatic.  It will be found on reference to most landscapes, especially those of the English schools, that it is the understanding, already informed on the subject, which accepts as reflected the continual attempts to render this kind of color:  they are regarded as indicative.  But the eye, which should have been satisfied first, recognizes nothing more than local coloring.  Near objects, under broad, open daylight, yield us their local coloring,—­as the surfaces of stones, the trunks of trees, and the many tints of soil and vegetation,—­yet even here all is modified by reflections.  We remember a cliff at L’Ariccia, which, gray in morning light, became, as evening approached, a marvellous beryl green, upon which some large poppies cast wafts of purest scarlet.  Farther away, both local and reflected color lose their power.  The rays no longer convey information of surfaces as separate existences.  Nature gathers up into masses, and these masses tide back to the foreground colors far removed in character from the near.  Vast combinations of rays and atmospheric influences have wrought this change.  As we have said, noon gives us the earth clean and itself; but, as the sun declines, flushes of color pass along the ground.  Their character we have already described.  The particles which fill the atmosphere just above the surface of the earth become illuminated and visible in radiant masses.  Farther away there is floated over the mountains a miraculous bloom, a bloom like that upon virgin fruit; and still more remote, upon the far sea, there is a dream of amber mantling the sleeping blue.  To render these effects, to give us the illuminated air, the soft green which the mossy sod casts upon the shaded cliff, the precious bloom upon the hills, and the tints diffused along the sea,—­to achieve this so completely that there never shall be any doubt, to give us upon the canvas what shall be all this to the beholder, is great, and this Mr. Tilton has performed.

THE EXPERIENCES OF THE A. C.