tion
rules the slight-knit snow-flake and the hard foundations of the earth.
The thistle-down floats secure upon the same summer zephyrs that are
woven into the tornado. The dew-drop holds within its transparent cell
the same electric fire which charges the thunder-cloud. In the softest
tree or the airiest waterfall, the fundamental lines are as lithe and
muscular as the crouching haunches of a leopard; and without a pencil
vigorous enough to render these, no mere mass of foam or foliage,
however exquisitely finished, can tell the story. Lightness of touch is
the crowning test of power.

Yet Nature does not work by single spasms only. That chestnut spray is
not an isolated and exhaustive effort of creative beauty: look upward
and see its sisters rise with pile above pile of fresh and stately
verdure, till tree meets sky in a dome of glorious blossom, the whole as
perfect as the parts, the least part as perfect as the whole. Studying
the details, it seems as if Nature were a series of costly fragments
with no coherency,--as if she would never encourage us to do anything
systematically, would tolerate no method but her own, and yet had none
of her own,--were as abrupt in her transitions from oak to maple as
the heroine who went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an
apple-pie; while yet there is no conceivable human logic so close
and inexorable as her connections. How rigid, how flexible are, for
instance, the laws of perspective! If one could learn to make his
statements as firm and unswerving as the horizon-line,--his continuity
of thought as marked, yet as unbroken, as yonder soft gradations by
which the eye is lured upward from lake to wood, from wood to hill, from
hill to heavens,--what more bracing tonic could literary culture demand?
As it is, Art misses the parts, yet does not grasp the whole.

Literature also learns from Nature the use of materials: either to
select only the choicest and rarest, or to transmute coarse to fine by
skill in using. How perfect is the delicacy with which the woods and
fields are kept, throughout the year! All these millions of living
creatures born every season, and born to die; yet where are the dead
bodies? We never see them. Buried beneath the earth by tiny nightly
sextons, sunk beneath the waters, dissolved into the air, or distilled
again and again as food for other organizations,--all have had their
swift resurrection. Their existence blooms again in these violet-pet