nd the great poet's or painter's knowledge of them. The one notes their
distinctions for the sake of swelling his herbarium, the other, that he
may render them vehicles of expression and emotion. The one counts the
stamens, and affixes a name, and is content; the other observes every
character of the plant's color and form; considering each of its
attributes as an element of expression, he seizes on its lines of grace
or energy, rigidity or repose; notes the feebleness or the vigor, the
serenity or tremulousness of its hues; observes its local habits, its
love or fear of peculiar places, its nourishment or destruction by
particular influences; he associates it in his mind with all the
features of the situations it inhabits, and the ministering agencies
necessary to its support. Thenceforward the flower is to him a living
creature, with histories written on its leaves, and passions breathing
in its motion. Its occurrence in his picture is no mere point of color,
no meaningless spark of light. It is a voice rising from the earth,--a
new chord of the mind's music,--a necessary note in the harmony of his
picture, contributing alike to its tenderness and its dignity, nor less
to its loveliness than its truth.

The particularization of flowers by Shakspeare and Shelley affords us
the most frequent examples of the exalted use of these inferior details.
It is true that the painter has not the same power of expressing the
thoughts with which his symbols are connected; he is dependent in some
degree on the knowledge and feeling of the spectator; but, by the
destruction of such details, his foreground is not rendered more
intelligible to the ignorant, although it ceases to have interest for
the informed. It is no excuse for illegible writing that there are
persons who could not have read it had it been plain.

I repeat then, generalization, as the word is commonly understood, is
the act of a vulgar, incapable, and unthinking mind. To see in all
mountains nothing but similar heaps of earth; in all rocks, nothing but
similar concretions of solid matter; in all trees, nothing but similar
accumulations of leaves, is no sign of high feeling or extended thought.
The more we know, and the more we feel, the more we separate; we
separate to obtain a more perfect unity. Stones, in the thoughts of the
peasant, lie as they do on his field, one is like another, and there is
no connection between any of them. The geologist distinguishes, and in