ing momentary grouping of persons,
traits of character in varied combination and contrast,--all these are
significant for the literary artist of spiritual relations.

As the symbol of what the artist feels and strives to express, the
individual work of art is necessarily more than any mere transcript
of fact. It is the meeting and mingling of nature and the spirit of man;
the result of their union is fraught with the inheritance of the past
and holds within it the limitless promise of the future. The work of
art is a focus, gathering into itself all the stored experience of the
artist, and radiating in turn so much to the beholder as he is able at
the moment to receive. A painter is starting out to sketch. Through
underbrush and across the open he pushes his way, beset by beauty
on every side, and storing impressions, sensations, thoughts. At last
his eye lights upon some clump of brush, some meadow or hill,
which seems at the instant to sum up and express his accumulated
experience. In rendering this bit of nature, he pours out upon his
canvas his store of feeling. It is the single case which typifies his
entire course. "The man's whole life preludes the single deed." His
way through the world has been just such a gathering up of
experience, and each new work which he produces is charged with
the collected wealth of years.

The special work is the momentary epitome of the artist's total
meaning. He finds this brief passage in nature beautiful then and
there because it expresses what he feels and means. He does not try
to reproduce the thing, but uses the thing for what it signifies. The
thing is but for that moment: it signifies all that has gone before. As
he watches, a cloud passes over the sun and the face of nature is
darkened. Suddenly the scene bursts into light again. In itself the
landscape is no brighter than before the sun was darkened. The
painter feels it brighter for the contrast, and inevitably his rendering
of its aspect is heightened and intensified.

Art is nature heightened and intensified as nature is interpreted
through the transfiguring medium of the human spirit To the object
is added

"The gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet's dream."

After an early morning in the fields, Corot withdraws to his house to
rest. "I dream of the morning landscape," he writes; "I dream my
picture, and presently I will paint my dream." But not only d