race of men, and it is still but a tapestry thrown over his own being and inner soul; and the bearing of it will show, infallibly, whether it hangs on a man or on a skeleton.  If you are dim-eyed, you may not see the difference in the fall of the folds at first, but learn how to look, and the folds themselves will become transparent, and you shall see through them the death’s shape, or the divine one, making the tissue above it as a cloud of right, or as a winding-sheet.

108.  Then further, observe, I have said (and you will find it true, and that to the uttermost) that, as all lovely art is rooted in virtue, so it bares fruit of virtue, and is didactic in its own nature.  It is often didactic also in actually expressed thought, as Giotto’s, Michael Angelo’s, Duerer’s, and hundreds more; but that is not its special function; it is didactic chiefly by being beautiful; but beautiful with haunting thought, no less than with form, and full of myths that can be read only with the heart.

For instance, at this moment there is open beside me as I write, a page of Persian manuscript, wrought with wreathed azure and gold, and soft green, and violet, and ruby and scarlet, into one field of pure resplendence.  It is wrought to delight the eyes only; and does delight them; and the man who did it assuredly had eyes in his head; but not much more.  It is not didactic art, but its author was happy; and it will do the good, and the harm, that mere pleasure can do.  But, opposite me, is an early Turner drawing of the lake of Geneva, taken about two miles from Geneva, on the Lausanne road, with Mont Blanc in the distance.  The old city is seen lying beyond the waveless waters, veiled with a sweet misty veil of Athena’s weaving; a faint light of morning, peaceful exceedingly, and almost colorless, shed from behind the Voirons, increases into soft amber along the slope of the Saleve, and is just seen, and no more, on the fair warm fields of its summit, between the folds of a white cloud that rests upon the grass, but rises, high and tower-like, into the zenith of dawn above.

109.  There is not as much color in that low amber light upon the hillside as there is in the palest dead leaf.  The lake is not blue, but gray in mist, passing into deep shadow beneath the Voirons’ pines; a few dark clusters of leaves, a single white flower—­scarcely seen—­are all the gladness given to the rocks of the shore.  One of the ruby spots of the eastern manuscript would give color enough for all the red that is in Turner’s entire drawing.  For the mere pleasure of the eye, there is not so much in all those lines of his, throughout the entire landscape, as in half an inch square of the Persian’s page.  What made him take pleasure in the low color that is only like the brown of a dead leaf? in the cold gray of dawn—­in the one white flower among the rocks—­in these—­and no more than these?