variety. There is no bush on the face of the globe exactly like another bush, there are no two trees in the forest whose boughs bend into the same net-work, nor two leaves on the same tree which could not be told one from the other, nor two waves on the sea exactly alike. And, out of this mass of various but agreeing beauty, it is by long attention only that the conception of the constant character - the ideal form - hinted at by all, yet assumed by none, is fixed upon the imagination for its standard of truth. It is not singular, therefore, nor in any way disgraceful, that the majority of spectators are totally incapable of appreciating the truth of nature, when fully set before them; but it is both singular and disgraceful that it so difficult to convince them of their own incapability. Ask a connoisseur, who has scampered all over Europe, the shape of the leaf of an elm, and the chances are ninety to one that he cannot tell you, and yet he will be voluble of criticism on every painted landscape from Dresden to Madrid, and pretend to tell you whether they are like nature or not. Ask an enthusiastic chatterer in the Sistine Chapel how many ribs he has, and you get no answer; but it is odds that you do not get out of the door without his informing you that he considers such and such fgure badly drawn. A few such interrogations as these might indeed convinct, if not convince the mass of spectators of incapability, were it not for the universal reply that they can recognise what they cannot describe, and feel what is truthful, though they do not know what is truth. And this is, to a certain degree, true: a man may recognise the portrait of his friend, though he cannot, if you ask him apart, tell you the shape of his nose or the height of his forehead, and every one could tell Nature herself from an imitation; why not then, it will be asked, what is like her from what is not?"

"The finely-toned pictures of the old masters are, in this respect, some of the notes of nature played two or three octaves below her key, the darks objects in the middle distance having precisely the same relation to the light of the sky which they have in nature, but the light being necessarily infinitely lowered, and the mass of the shadow deepened in the same degree. I have often been struck, when looking at a camera-obscura, on a dark day, with the exact resemblance the image bore to one of the finest pictures of the old masters, all the foliage coming dark against the sky, and nothing being seen in its mass but here and there the isolated light of a silvery stem, or an unusually illumined cluster of leafage. Now if this could be done consistently, and all the notes of nature given in this way, an octave or two down, it would be right and necessary so to do; but be it observed, not only does nature surpass us in power of obtaining light, as much as the sun surpasses white paper, but she also infintely surpasses us in her power of shade. Her deepest shades are void spaces from which no light whatever is reflected to the eye; ours are black surfaces from which, paint as black as we may, a great deal of light is still reflected, and which, placed against one of nature's deep bits of gloom, would tell as distinct light. Here we are, then, with white paper for our highest light, and visible illumined surface for our deepest shadow, set to run the gauntlet against nature, with the sun for her light and vacuity for her gloom. It is evident that she can well afford to throw her material objects dark against the brillian aerial tone of her sky, and yet give in those objects themselves a thousand intermediate distances and tones before she comes to black, or to any thing like it - all the illumined surfaces of her objects being as distinctly and vividly brighter than her nearest and darkest shadows as the sky is brighter than those illumined surfaces. But if we, against our poor, dull obscurity of yellow paint, instead of sky, insist on having the same relation of shade in material objects, we go down to the bottom of our scale at once; and what in the world are we to do then? Where are all our intermediate distances to come from? - how are we to express the aerial relations among the parts themselves, for instance, of foliage, whose most distant boughs are already almost black? - how are we to come up from this to the foreground, and, when we have done so, how are we to express the