That distended sail is
filled with the lurid air. That dead man's foot hangs off in the
seething brine a stark reality. What a fixed gaze of despair in that
father's stony eye! What a group of deathly living ones around that
frail mast, while one with intense eagerness flutters a signal to some
far-descried bark! Coleridge's Ancient Mariner has no colors more
fearfully faithful to his theme. Heaven pities them not. Ocean is all
in uproar against them. And there is no voice that can summon the
distant, flying sail! So France appeared to that prophet painter's
eye, in the subsiding tempests of the revolution. So men's hearts
failed them for fear, and the dead lay stark and stiff among the
living, amid the sea and the waves roaring; and so mute signals of
distress were hung out in the lurid sky to nations afar.
For my part, I remain a heretic. Give to these French pictures the
mellowing effects of age, impregnating not merely the picture, but the
eye that gazes on it, with its subtle quality; let them be gazed at
through the haze of two hundred years, and they will--or I cannot see
why they will not--rival the productions of any past age.
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