I watched and waited with a steadfast will: 
    And, tho’ the object seemed to flee away
    That I so longed for, ever, day by day,
      I watched and waited still.

  Sometimes I said,—­“This thing shall be no more;
    My expectation wearies, and shall cease;
    I will resign it now, and be at peace:”—­
      Yet never gave it o’er.

  Sometimes I said,—­“It is an empty name
    I long for; to a name why should I give
    The peace of all the days I have to live?”—­
      Yet gave it all the same.

  Alas! thou foolish one,—­alike unfit
    For healthy joy and salutary pain,
    Thou knowest the chase useless, and again
      Turnest to follow it.

The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art

The object we have proposed to ourselves in writing on Art, has been “an endeavour to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of nature; and also to direct attention, as an auxiliary medium, to the comparatively few works which Art has yet produced in this spirit.”  It is in accordance with the former and more prominent of these objects that the writer proposes at present to treat.

An unprejudiced spectator of the recent progress and main direction of Art in England will have observed, as a great change in the character of the productions of the modern school, a marked attempt to lead the taste of the public into a new channel by producing pure transcripts and faithful studies from nature, instead of conventionalities and feeble reminiscences from the Old Masters; an entire seeking after originality in a more humble manner than has been practised since the decline of Italian Art in the Middle Ages.  This has been most strongly shown by the landscape painters, among whom there are many who have raised an entirely new school of natural painting, and whose productions undoubtedly surpass all others in the simple attention to nature in detail as well as in generalities.  By this they have succeeded in earning for themselves the reputation of being the finest landscape painters in Europe.  But, although this success has been great and merited, it is not of them that we have at present to treat, but rather to recommend their example to their fellow-labourers, the historical painters.

That the system of study to which this would necessarily lead requires a somewhat longer and more devoted course of observation than any other is undoubted; but that it has a reward in a greater effect produced, and more delight in the searching, is, the writer thinks, equally certain.  We shall find a greater pleasure in proportion to our closer communion with nature, and by a more exact adherence to all her details, (for nature has no peculiarities or excentricities) in whatsoever direction her study may conduct.

This patient devotedness appears to be a conviction peculiar to, or at least more purely followed by, the early Italian Painters; a feeling which, exaggerated, and its object mistaken by them, though still held holy and pure, was the cause of the retirement of many of the greatest men from the world to the monastery; there, in undisturbed silence and humility,