SCENE BETWEEN CLAIRMONT AND MAUVES. 51

wanderer feels as if entering into some region of old enchantment.

But not the wanderer alone, who, like ourselves, floats nameless and unnoticed down the stream, or steals along those hoary ramparts of nature, listening to the mysterious music of the wind, as it mingles with the far and sullen plunge of the waters,-calling up, as with a name and a spell, the unwilling phantoms of history, and the spectral shadows of romance-and musing over forgotten graves and nameless ruins, till the present, with its outward and visible forms, vanishes from his eyes, and buried ages rise again from the gulf of time, and the antique world is renewed, both to soul and sense, not as a vision, but a reality. Not he alone who, with a weak and ineffectual voice, repeats the echoes of the Loire, syllabling his thought into faint sounds that rise upon the inattentive ear of the world, "like the remembrance of a dream;" but they, too, the children of genius, whose names are as household words in the mouths of their fellow-men, to whom is given the power of reflecting, as in a magic glass, the forms of this deified nature, which others only worship -here must they pause and linger; the God stirs omnipotently within them; fast and thick rain their ideas upon the cartoon; and, wrought under their enchantments, the image destined for the world's idolatry becomes, not a dead copy of external forms, but a true original, endowed with life, and redolent of poetry.

No one who possesses a feeling of art, or an eye for nature, after looking at the pieces which illustrate the present portion of the SCENERY OF THE LOIRE, will hesitate to confirm the application of this description to that gifted man, on whom destiny or whim has bestowed so unequal a companion.

52 SCENE BETWEEN CLAIRMONT AND MAUVES.

Here TURNER was in his element; he rioted in beauty and power; and if to the cold in soul and imagination his paintings may seem defective in mathematical accuracy, they will be identified at a single glance with the originals by all who can feel genius, and who are capable of seeing in nature something beyond its outward and tangible forms.

On the left bank, an imposing mass of mountains, crowded with ruins in the engraving, which are already among the things that were, rises majestically several hundred feet above the water's edge. Below, some antique arches, resembling the ruins of a bridge, throw themselves out into the river; and we wonder within ourselves at the hardiness which could have conceived the idea of spanning, with a stone construction, so vast a body of water as the Loire forms at this place. The bridge, however, extended no farther than we see it to-day; and the river, now so much expanded, rolled, in all probability, at the time of its erection, in a much narrower channel. It was here that, in the early part of the thirteenth century, a famous robber had his stronghold. Inhabiting himself a castle, perched on the summit of the steep-from which it seemed to glare around, with a jealous and threatening aspect, upon the whole valley of the Loire his vassals lay watching below in the shadow of the bridge for the passing mariner.

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