e, without one part or
portion being lost or merged in it--the unity of action with infinity of
agent. And I wish to insist on this the more particularly, because it is
one of the eternal principles of nature, that she will not have one line
nor color, nor one portion nor atom of space without a change in it.
There is not one of her shadows, tints, or lines that is not in a state
of perpetual variation: I do not mean in time, but in space. There is
not a leaf in the world which has the _same color_ visible over its
whole surface; it has a white high light somewhere; and in proportion as
it curves to or from that focus, the color is brighter or grayer. Pick
up a common flint from the roadside, and count, if you can, its changes
and hues of color. Every bit of bare ground under your feet has in it a
thousand such--the gray pebbles, the warm ochre, the green of incipient
vegetation, the grays and blacks of its reflexes and shadows, might
keep a painter at work for a month, if he were obliged to follow them
touch for touch: how much more, when the same infinity of change is
carried out with vastness of object and space. The extreme of distance
may appear at first monotonous; but the least examination will show it
to be full of every kind of change--that its outlines are perpetually
melting and appearing again--sharp here, vague there--now lost
altogether, now just hinted and still confused among each other--and so
forever in a state and necessity of change. Hence, wherever in a
painting we have unvaried color extended even over a small space, there
is falsehood. Nothing can be natural which is monotonous; nothing true
which only tells one story. The brown foreground and rocks of Claude's
Sinon before Priam are as false as color can be: first, because there
never was such a brown under sunlight, for even the sand and cinders
(volcanic tufa) about Naples, granting that he had studied from these
ugliest of all formations, are, where they are fresh fractured, golden
and lustrous in full light compared to these ideals of crag, and become,
like all other rocks, quiet and gray when weathered; and secondly,
because no rock that ever nature stained is without its countless
breaking tints of varied vegetation. And even Stanfield, master as he is
of rock form, is apt in the same way to give us here and there a little
bit of mud, instead of stone.

Sec. 17. His dislike of purple and fondness for the opposition of yellow and
b