III. TURNER AND HIS WORKS 121

your own Walter Scott.¹ Many writers, indeed, describe nature more minutely and more profoundly; but none show in higher intensity the peculiar passion for what is majestic or lovely in wild nature, to which I am now referring. The whole of the poem of the Lady of the Lake is written with almost a boyish enthusiasm for rocks, and lakes, and cataracts; the early novels show the same instinct in equal strength wherever he approaches Highland scenery; and the feeling is mingled, observe, with a most touching and affectionate appreciation of the Gothic architecture,² in which alone he found the elements of natural beauty seized by art; so that, to this day, his descriptions of Melrose and Holy Island Cathedral, in the Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion, as well as of the ideal abbeys in the Monastery and Antiquary, together with those of Caerlaverock and Lochleven Castles in Guy Mannering and The Abbot, remain the staple possessions and text-books of all travellers, not so much for their beauty or accuracy, as for their exactly expressing that degree of feeling with which most men in this century can sympathise.

Together with Scott appeared the group of poets-Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and, finally, Tennyson-differing widely in moral principles and spiritual temper, but all agreeing more or less in this love for natural scenery.

93. Now, you will ask me-and you will ask me most reasonably-how this love of nature in modern days can be connected with Christianity, seeing it is as strong in the infidel Shelley as in the sacred Wordsworth. Yes, and it is found in far worse men than Shelley.³ Shelley was an honest unbeliever, and a man of warm affections; but this new love of nature is found in the most reckless and unprincipled of the French novelists-in Eugène Sue, in Dumas, in George Sand⁴-and that intensely. How is this? Simply

¹ [The landscape of Scott is discussed at greater length in Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xvi.]

² [See, however, Seven Lamps of Architecture, Preface to ed. 2, Vol. VIII. p. 9.]

³ [For Ruskin’s view of Shelley, see passages collected in Vol. I. p. 253 n.]

⁴ [For other references to Eugène Sue, see Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xvii. §§ 7, 27; vol. iv. ch. xix. § 16; Academy Notes, 1857, No. 8; and a letter to Dr.

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