Page:Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (IA gri 33125011175656).pdf/23

 "Yet now despair itself is mild, Even as the winds and waters are, I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear, Till death like sleep might steal on me,— And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony."

329. —Evening Hymn.—Again a very poetical and beautiful picture, one of the enduring glories of the present exhibition. It reaches higher than anything Mr. Mason had hitherto done; and shows him qualified to paint figures on a fair scale of size, and with an amount of positive beauty which, in his previous productions (though well traceable), was to some extent overlaid by the picturesque, as that is popularly understood. This work glows with the light of a spring sunset, and with the unbidden fervour of a group of young village-girls who are carolling the Evening Hymn as they saunter homewards. It seems almost churlish to object to a leading point of treatment in so delightful a picture; but I confess to some suspicion that the men who are shown listening might with advantage have been missed out of the subject altogether—and more especially the youth who comes close behind a girl in white, holding a rose in her hand. Mr. Mason is a painter who never loses sight of facts in his pursuit of the beautiful; this is the one of his works which goes nearest to merging all other its material in a general ideal of loveliness and solemnity.

331. —Tussle with a Highland Smuggler.—Here we revert to the category of sketchy work; and we see in this picture and in another by its author (No. 484, "Weary with present cares and memories sad"),an unpleasant and unrepaying development of style which might be described as "the offhand squalid." No. 331 shows extreme—indeed, excessive—cleverness: but its unsightly violence of action embodies a subject of little consequence to any one, and of less still to the cause of fine art.

347. —"Weel, sir, if the deer got the ball,