Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 25, Pages 227-228
THE STORM-PAINTER*[1] IN HIS DUNGEON.
—Where of ye, O tempests, is the goal!
Are ye like those that shake the human breast,
Or do ye find at length, like eagles, some high nest?
Childe Harold.
Midnight! and silence deep!
The air is fill'd with sleep,
With the stream's whisper and the citron's breath;
The fixed and solemn stars
Gleam thro' my dungeon-bars—
Wake, rushing winds! this breezeless calm is death!
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* Pietro Mulier, called Il Tempesta, from his surprising pictures of storms. "His compositions," says Lanzi, "inspire a real horror, presenting to our eyes death-devoted ships overtaken by tempests and darkness, fired by lightning, now rising on the mountain-waves, and again submerged in the abyss of ocean." During an imprisonment of five years in Genoa, the pictures which he painted in his dungeon were marked by additional power and gloom.—See Lanzi's History of Painting, translated by Roscoe.
