Then farther, 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 bears 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 geld, 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 colourless, 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 towerlike, into the zenith of dawn above.

There is not as much colour in that low amber light upon the hill-side as there is in the palest dead leaf.  The lake is not blue, but grey 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 colour 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 colour that is only like the brown of a dead leaf? in the cold grey of dawn—­in the one white flower among the rocks—­in these—­and no more than these?

He took pleasure in them because he had been bred among English fields and hills; because the gentleness of a great race was in his heart, and its power of thought in his brain; because he knew the stories of the Alps, and of the cities at their feet; because he had read the Homeric legends of the clouds, and beheld the gods of dawn, and the givers of dew to the fields; because he knew the faces of the crags, and the imagery of the passionate mountains, as a man knows the face of his friend; because he had in him the wonder and sorrow concerning life and death, which