is, for his sins,
fated to continue so to the end of the chapter--_i.e._, our interminable
rhymes; til, tired of exchanging our bad prose for worse poetry, (and
having the fear of his maledictions before our eyes,) we throw it aside
in a pet. Then comes a change over our spirit; and we dabble in
paint-pots, and flourish a palette, and are great on canvass, and in
chalks, and there is a mingled perfume of oil and turpentine in our
_studio_ (whilome study) that is to us highly refreshing, and good
against fainting; and we make tours in search of the picturesque,
climbing over stone walls, and what not, to gain some hill-top whence we
may see the sun set or the moon rise, haply getting soused in a
peat-drain for our pains--and we pencil sketches from nature, really
very like; and the blue mountains, the solemn sunsets, and purple
shadows among the woods, or falling on the tawny sands, girdling the
sea, whose blue-gray melts into the horizon, throw us into quick
ecstasies of delight that almost paralyse the adventurous hand as it
seeks, often vainly, to transfer the quick-changing loveliness to the
enduring canvass. And then we fling away our pencils in despair, and
worship, with all the devotion of which ignorance is the mother, (for we
never handled the chisel,) the serene beauty of sculpture; most
passionless, most intellectual art, breathing the repose of divinity,
the grand inaction of the All-powerful; shadowing forth in this its
perfection, sublime truth, with its faint, troubled, yet still sublime
reflection, error;--the "without passions" of Divine revelation, and its
perversion, its undue development, the unconsciousness, issuing in the
final perfection of annihilation, of Braminical deity. So are the
extremes of truth and error linked--the error depending for its
existence on its antagonist truth. Painting is objective, sculpture
subjective, throwing the mind more upon itself, to seek there the hidden
forms of grace and beauty yet unmanifested by pencil or chisel. The one
appeals more to the senses, the other to the imagination and the mind;
exciting ideas rather than presenting them. Painting, sublimate it as
you will, is still of the earth; albeit a purer one than this desolated
habitation in which the sons of Adam mourn their exile--even the
unviolated Eden; of which it is one of the fairest, tenderest
emanations, reaching forward to the angelic, yet still a child of earth
with mortality on its brow. Sculpture