eminences of the foreground—"Passage of Mont Cenis. J. M. W. Turner, January 15th, 1820."
The scene is on the summit of the pass close to the hospice, or what seems to have been a hospice at that time,—I do not remember such at present,—a small square-built house, built as if partly for a fortress, with a detached flight of stone steps in front of it, and a kind of drawbridge to the door. This building, about four hundred or five hundred yards off, is seen in a dim, ashy gray against the light, which by help of a violent blast of mountain wind has broken though the depth of clouds which hangs upon the crags. There is no sky, properly so-called, nothing but this roof of drifting cloud; but neither is there any weight of darkness—the high air is too thin for it,—all savage, howling, and luminous with cold, the massy bases of the granite hills jutting out here and there grimly through the snow wreaths. There is a desolate-looking refuge on the left, with its number 16, marked on it in long ghastly figures, and the wind is drifting the snow off the roof and through its