He paints in water-colors marvellous strange pictures,
visions of his brain, which he asserts that he has seen; they have great
merit. He has _seen_ the old Welsh bards on Snowdon,--he has seen the
beautifullest, the strongest, and the ugliest man, left alone from the
massacre of the Britons by the Romans, and has painted them from memory
(I have seen his paintings), and asserts them to be as good as the
figures of Raphael and Angelo, but not better, as they had precisely the
same retro-visions and prophetic visions with themself [himself]. The
painters in oil (which he will have it that neither of them practised)
he affirms to have been the ruin of art, and affirms that all the while
he was engaged in his Welsh paintings, Titian was disturbing him,--
Titian the Ill Genius of Oil Painting. His pictures--one in particular,
the Canterbury Pilgrims, far above Stothard--have great merit, but hard,
dry, yet with grace. He has written a Catalogue of them, with a most
spirited criticism on Chaucer, but mystical and full of vision. His
poems have been sold hitherto only in manuscript. I never read them; but
a friend at my desire procured the "Sweep Song." There is one to a
tiger, which I have heard recited, beginning,--
"Tiger, Tiger, burning bright,
Thro' the deserts of the night,"
which is glorious, but, alas! I have not the book; for the man is flown,
whither I know not,--to Hades or a madhouse.
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