me in its way,
and pushed it aside, and tried to strangle or starve it; where and when
kind trees have sheltered it, and grown up lovingly together with it,
bending as it bent; what winds torment it most; what boughs of it behave
best, and bear most fruit; and so on. In a wave or cloud, these leading
lines show the run of the tide and of the wind, and the sort of change
which the water or vapour is at any moment enduring in its form, as it
meets shore, or counterwave, or melting sunshine. Now remember, nothing
distinguishes great men from inferior men more than their always,
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. 291.) 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.]

[Illustration: FIG. 18.]

[Illustration: FIG. 19.]

So in trees in general and bushes, large or small, you will notice that,
thoug