e of the
daguerreotyped towers of Fribourg, I have given, Fig. 1, a Dureresque,
and Fig. 3, a Blottesque, version of the intermediate wall. The latter
version may, perhaps, be felt to have some pleasantness in its apparent
ease; and it has a practical advantage, in its capability of being
executed in a quarter of a minute, while the Dureresque statement
_cannot_ be made in less than a quarter of an hour. But the latter
embraces not only as much as is worth the extra time, but even an
infinite of contents, beyond and above the other, for the other is in no
single place clear in its assertion of _any_thing; whereas the
Dureresque work, asserting clearly many most interesting facts about the
grass on the ledges, the bricks of the windows, and the growth of the
foliage, is forever a useful and trustworthy record; the other forever
an empty dream. If it is a beautiful dream, full of lovely color and
good composition, we will not quarrel with it; but it can never be so,
unless it is founded first on the Dureresque knowledge, and suggestive
of it, through all its own mystery or incompletion. So that by all
students the Dureresque is the manner to be first adopted, and calmly
continued as long as possible; and if their inventive instincts do not,
in after life, _force_ them to swifter or more cloudy execution,--if at
any time it becomes a matter of doubt with them how far to surrender
their gift of accuracy,--let them be assured that it is best always to
err on the side of clearness; to live in the illumination of the
thirteenth century rather than the mysticism of the nineteenth, and vow
themselves to the cloister rather than to lose themselves in the desert.

Sec. 21. I am afraid the reader must be tired of this matter; and yet there
is one question more which I must for a moment touch upon, in
conclusion, namely, the mystery of _clearness itself_. In an Italian
twilight, when, sixty or eighty miles away, the ridge of the Western
Alps rises in its dark and serrated blue against the crystalline
vermilion, there is still unsearchableness, but an unsearchableness
without cloud or concealment,--an infinite unknown, but no sense of any
veil or interference between us and it: we are separated from it not by
any anger or storm, not by any vain and fading vapor, but only by the
deep infinity of the thing itself. I find that the great religious
painters rejoiced in that kind of unknowableness, and in that only; and
I feel that even if