Note 231 — A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY (continued 2)
Reading edition
Smith’s little present to Sir George Beaumont is the more interesting to us, because of that painter’s well-known love of brown, and his dictum that “there ought to be at least one brown tree in every landscape.” Beaumont’s name is inseparably associated with the National Gallery, and also with Wordsworth’s noble poem on his picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, containing the lines—
“Ah! then if mine had been the painter’s hand To express what then I saw; and add the gleam, The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration, and the Poet’s dream,— I would have planted thee, thou hoary pile, Amid a world how different from this! Beside a sea that could not cease to smile; On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.”