nd we are
always trying to get them bright, when their real virtues are to be
deep, mysterious, and subdued. We will have a thorough study of painted
glass soon: mean while I merely give you a type of its perfect style, in
two windows from Chalons-sur-Marne (S. 141).

187. But for my own part, with what poor gift and skill is in me, I
belong wholly to the chiaroscurist school; and shall teach you therefore
chiefly that which I am best able to teach: and the rather, that it is
only in this school that you can follow out the study either of natural
history or landscape. The form of a wild animal, or the wrath of a
mountain torrent, would both be revolting (or in a certain sense
invisible) to the calm fantasy of a painter in the schools of crystal.
He must lay his lion asleep in St. Jerome's study beside his tame
partridge and easy slippers; lead the appeased river by alternate azure
promontories, and restrain its courtly little streamlets with margins of
marble. But, on the other hand, your studies of mythology and literature
may best be connected with these schools of purest and calmest
imagination; and their discipline will be useful to you in yet another
direction, and that a very important one. It will teach you to take
delight in little things, and develop in you the joy which all men
should feel in purity and order, not only in pictures but in reality.
For, indeed, the best art of this school of fantasy may at last be in
reality, and the chiaroscurists, true in ideal, may be less helpful in
act. We cannot arrest sunsets nor carve mountains, but we may turn every
English homestead, if we choose, into a picture by Cima or John Bellini,
which shall be "no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life
indeed."

188. For the present, however, and yet for some little time during your
progress, you will not have to choose your school. For both, as we have
seen, begin in delineation, and both proceed by filling flat spaces
with an even tint. And therefore this following will be the course of
work for you, founded on all that we have seen.

Having learned to measure, and draw a pen line with some steadiness (the
geometrical exercises for this purpose being properly school, not
University work), you shall have a series of studies from the plants
which are of chief importance in the history of art; first from their
real forms, and then from the conventional and heraldic expressions of
them; then we will take examp