PRE-RAPHAELITISM 371

possessed. The man who can best feel the difference between rudeness and tenderness in humanity, perceives also more difference between the branches of an oak and a willow than any one else would; and, therefore, necessarily the most striking character of the drawings themselves is the speciality of whatever they represent-the thorough stiffness of what is stiff, and grace of what is graceful, and vastness of what is vast; but through and beyond all this, the condition of the mind of the painter himself is easily enough discoverable by comparison of a large number of the drawings. It is singularly serene and peaceful: in itself quite passionless, though entering with ease into the external passion which it contemplates. By the effort of its will it sympathises with tumult or distress, even in their extremes, but there is no tumult, no sorrow in itself, only a chastened and exquisitely peaceful cheerfulness, deeply meditative; touched, without loss of its own perfect balance, by sadness on the one side, and stooping to playfulness upon the other. I shall never cease to regret the destruction, by fire, now several years ago, of a drawing which always seemed to me to be the perfect image of the painter’s mind at this period,-the drawing of Brignall Church near Rokeby,¹ of which a feeble idea may still be gathered from the engraving (in the Yorkshire series). The spectator stands on the “Brignall banks,”² looking down into the glen at twilight; the sky is still full of soft rays, though the sun is gone, and the Greta glances brightly in the valley, singing its even-song; two white clouds, following each other, move without wind through the hollows of the ravine, and others lie couched on the far-away moorlands; every leaf of the woods is still in the delicate air; a boy’s kite, incapable of rising, has become entangled in their branches, he is climbing to recover it; and just behind

¹ [This drawing was shown in 1824 in Cooke’s Exhibition, and engraved in Whitaker’s Richmondshire. It belonged to Griffith, the picture-dealer, who considered it to be the finest Turner had ever made. Griffith admired it so much that he could never be induced to part with it; and it was burnt in a fire in his house, where Ruskin no doubt had often seen and studied it (see Vol. III. p. xxviii.).]

² [Scott: Rokeby, iii. 16.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]