216 PRÆTERITA-I

Trossachs, with brown cows standing in Loch Achray,¹ so much to my own satisfaction that I put my work up over my bedroom chimney-piece the last thing at night, and woke to its contemplation in the morning with a rapture, mixed of self-complacency and the sense of new faculty, in which I floated all that day, as in a newly-discovered and strongly buoyant species of air.

In a very little while, however, I found that this great first step did not mean consistent progress at the same pace. I saw that my washes, however careful or multitudinous, did not in the end look as smooth as Fielding’s, and that my crumblings of burnt umber became uninteresting after a certain number of repetitions.

With still greater discouragement, I perceived the Fielding processes to be inapplicable to the Alps. My scraggy touches did not to my satisfaction represent aiguilles, nor my ruled lines of shade, the Lake of Geneva. The watercolour drawing was abandoned, with a dim under-current of feeling that I had no gift for it,-and in truth I had none for colour arrangement,-and the pencil outline returned to with resolute energy.²

242. I had never, up to this time, seen a Turner drawing, and scarcely know whether to lay to the score of dulness, or prudence, the tranquillity in which I copied the engravings of the Rogers vignettes, without so much as once asking where the originals were. The facts being that they lay at the bottom of an old drawer in Queen Anne Street,³ inaccessible to me as the bottom of the sea, -and that, if I had seen them, they would only have destroyed my pleasure in the engravings,-my rest in these was at least fortunate: and the more I consider of this and other such forms of failure in what most people would

¹ [This drawing was exhibited at Coniston in 1900 (No. 34), and again at Manchester in 1904 (No. 33).]

² [For a passage which here follows in the MS., see the Appendix; below, p. 624.]

³ [They thus became the property of the nation upon Turner’s death, as he bequeathed all his drawings to the National Gallery.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]