I have never seen anything so impressive as the quarries at Carrara. The great white masses one can see as the train passes Carrara station, or from Pisa, are not snow, as many think, but marble—high on the tops of the mountains, quarried for centuries by regiments of men who toil on foot, in trains or are swung up in baskets to the summit. Then down the roughest track, only smoothed by the blocks, the marble is dragged by teams of oxen, driven by men sitting backward, to the railroad or the harbor. The contrast between the dazzling blocks, the blue sky and black trees, and untouched mountain side is intense.
I have no doubt I shall be told I am cheekily reckless to tackle Turner's subject—I have even known a collector to get rid of this print with scorn—but I am glad I drew it. I do not know if Turner made his drawing from the same point. Just where, after the long climb up the hill from Naples, between the cliffs, the road begins to descend, it turns, and all this is before you. I do not know whether it will be in existence when the book appears, or battered to ruin, but I do know that nowhere in the world is there such a combination of classic and mediæval motives and the spirit of modern work as in this view from the top of the hill looking down on the land and the sea near Naples.
In Italy alone can the wonder of the old and new work be found. This subject must have been sketched by Claude—for these two lighthouses appear—or others like them—possibly at Civita Vecchia, again and again in his paintings. But he never saw the harbor crowded with steamers, the twinkling lines of electric light, the cranes, the engines and the docks. I have, and have tried to draw them all.
I saw this extraordinary effect one day at Leeds. Nothing could be finer than the way the great, strange furnaces told like castles—and they are work castles—against the great white clouds of a summer day in England.
On its little hill, entirely covering it among the Five Towns, stands this work town. Pottery kilns and chimneys, and not church spires and campanile, crown it. But in that land of work—coal mines and factory stacks about—it is perfect as a composition—as fine as any of the little towns Rembrandt drew and Dürer built. I don't even know its name.