." Realization to the mind
necessitates not deception of the eye.

[J] I shall show, in a future portion of the work, that there are
principles of universal beauty common to all the creatures of God;
and that it is by the greater or less share of these that one form
becomes nobler or meaner than another.

[K] Is not this--it may be asked--demanding more from him than life
can accomplish? Not one whit. Nothing more than knowledge of
external characteristics is absolutely required; and even if, which
were more desirable, thorough scientific knowledge had to be
attained, the time which our artists spend in multiplying crude
sketches, or finishing their unintelligent embryos of the study,
would render them masters of every science that modern
investigations have organized, and familiar with every form that
Nature manifests. Martin, if the time which he must have spent on
the abortive bubbles of his Canute had been passed in working on the
seashore, might have learned enough to enable him to produce, with a
few strokes, a picture which would have smote like the sound of the
sea, upon men's hearts forever.

[L] "A green field is a sight which makes us pardon
The absence of that more sublime construction
Which mixes up vines, olive, precipices,
Glaciers, volcanoes, oranges, and ices."

_Don Juan._

[M] The vegetable soil of the Campagna is chiefly formed by
decomposed lavas, and under it lies a bed of white pumice, exactly
resembling remnants of bones.

[N] The feelings of Constable with respect to his art might be
almost a model for the young student, were it not that they err a
little on the other side, and are perhaps in need of chastening and
guiding from the works of his fellow-men. We should use pictures not
as authorities, but as comments on nature, just as we use divines,
not as authorities, but as comments on the Bible. Constable, in his
dread of saint-worship, excommunicates himself from all benefit of
the Church, and deprives himself of much instruction from the
Scripture to which he holds, because he will not accept aid in the
reading of it from the learning of other men. Sir George Beaumont,
on the contrary, furnishes, in the anecdotes given of him in
Constable's life, a melancholy