whether in life or in art, _knowing the way things are going_. Your
dunce thinks they are standing still, and draws them all fixed; your
wise man sees the change or changing in them, and draws them so,--the
animal in its motion, the tree in its growth, the cloud in its course,
the mountain in its wearing away. Try always, whenever you look at a
form, to see the lines in it which have had power over its past fate and
will have power over its futurity. Those are its _awful_ lines; see that
you seize on those, whatever else you miss. Thus, the leafage in Fig. 16
(p. 63) grew round the root of a stone pine, on the brow of a crag at
Sestri near Genoa, and all the sprays of it are thrust away in their
first budding by the great rude root, and spring out in every direction
round it, as water splashes when a heavy stone is thrown into it. Then,
when they have got clear of the root, they begin to bend up again; some
of them, being little stone pines themselves, have a great notion of
growing upright, if they can; and this struggle of theirs to recover
their straight road towards the sky, after being obliged to grow
sideways in their early years, is the effort that will mainly influence
their future destiny, and determine if they are to be crabbed, forky
pines, striking from that rock of Sestri, whose clefts nourish them,
with bared red lightning of angry arms towards the sea; or if they are
to be goodly and solemn pines, with trunks like pillars of temples, and
the purple burning of their branches sheathed in deep globes of cloudy
green. Those, then, are their fateful lines; see that you give that
spring and resilience, whatever you leave ungiven: depend upon it, their
chief beauty is in these.

[Illustration: FIG. 17.]

105. So in trees in general, and bushes, large or small, you will notice
that, though the boughs spring irregularly and at various angles, there
is a tendency in all to stoop less and less as they near the top of the
tree. This structure, typified in the simplest possible terms at _c_,
Fig. 17, is common to all trees that I know of, and it gives them a
certain plumy character, and aspect of unity in the hearts of their
branches which are essential to their beauty. The stem does not merely
send off a wild branch here and there to take its own way, but all the
branches share in one great fountain-like impulse; each has a curve and
a path to take, which fills a definite place, and each terminates all
its minor b