f ancient or modern art.

Let us examine a little further this "babble of green fields" and of
bare nature in general as superior to artificial imagery, for the
poetical purposes of the fine arts. In landscape painting, the great
artist does not give you a literal copy of a country, but he invents
and composes one. Nature, in her actual aspect, does not furnish him
with such existing scenes as he requires. Even where he presents you
with some famous city, or celebrated scene from mountain or other
nature, it must be taken from some particular point of view, and with
such light, and shade, and distance, &c. as serve not only to
heighten its beauties, but to shadow its deformities. The poetry of
nature alone, _exactly_ as she appears, is not sufficient to bear him
out. The very sky of his painting is not the _portrait_ of the sky of
nature; it is a composition of different _skies_, observed at
different times, and not the whole copied from any _particular_ day.
And why? Because nature is not lavish of her beauties; they are
widely scattered, and occasionally displayed, to be selected with
care, and gathered with difficulty.

Of sculpture I have just spoken. It is the great scope of the
sculptor to heighten nature into heroic beauty, _i.e._ in plain
English, to surpass his model. When Canova forms a statue, he takes a
limb from one, a hand from another, a feature from a third, and a
shape, it may be, from a fourth, probably at the same time improving
upon all, as the Greek of old did in embodying his Venus.

Ask a portrait painter to describe his agonies in accommodating the
faces with which nature and his sitters have crowded his
painting-room to the principles of his art: with the exception of
perhaps ten faces in as many millions, there is not one which he can
venture to give without shading much and adding more. Nature,
exactly, simply, barely nature, will make no great artist of any
kind, and least of all a poet--the most artificial, perhaps, of all
artists in his very essence. With regard to natural imagery, the
poets are obliged to take some of their best illustrations from
_art_. You say that a "fountain is as clear or clearer than _glass_"
to express its beauty:--

"O fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro!"

In the speech of Mark Antony, the body of Caesar is displayed, but so
also is his _mantle_:--

"You all do know this _mantle_," &c.

* * * * *

"Look! in this place