emn every minor painter utterly, the
moment we see he is foggy. Copley Fielding, for instance, was a minor
painter; but his love of obscurity in rain clouds, and dew-mist on
downs, was genuine love, full of sweetness and happy aspiration; and, in
this way, a little of the light of the higher mystery is often caught by
the simplest men when they keep their hearts open.

Sec. 15. Neither will it be right to set down every painter for a great
man, the moment we find he is clear; for there is a hard and vulgar
intelligibility of nothingness, just as there is an ambiguity of
nothingness. And as often, in conversation, a man who speaks but badly
and indistinctly has, nevertheless, got much to say; and a man who
speaks boldly and plainly may yet say what is little worth hearing; so,
in painting, there are men who can express themselves but blunderingly,
and yet have much in them to express; and there are others who talk with
great precision, whose works are yet very impertinent and untrustworthy
assertions. Sir Joshua Reynolds is full of fogginess and shortcomings as
compared with either of the Caraccis; but yet one Sir Joshua is worth
all the Caraccis in Europe; and so, in our modern water-color societies,
there are many men who define clearly enough, all whose works, put
together, are not worth a careless blot by Cox or Barrett.

Sec. 16. Let me give one illustration more, which will be also of some
historical usefulness in marking the relations of the clear and obscure
schools.

We have seen, in our investigation of Greek landscape, Homer's intense
love of the aspen poplar. For once, in honor of Homer and the Greeks, I
will take an aspen for the subject of comparison, and glance at the
different modes in which it would have been, or was, represented from
the earliest to the present stage of landscape art.

The earliest manner which comes within our field of examination is that
of the thirteenth century. Fig. 1. Plate 27 is an aspen out of the wood
in which Absalom is slain, from a Psalter in my own possession,
executed, certainly, after the year 1250, and before 1272; the other
trees in the wood being, first, of course, the oak in which Absalom is
caught, and a sycamore. All these trees are somewhat more conventional
than is even usual at the period; though, for this reason, the more
characteristic as examples of earliest work. There is no great botanical
accuracy until some forty years later (at least in painting); so t