hand held out to receive something, or shelter something. If you take a
looking-glass, and hold your hand before it slightly hollowed, with the
palm upwards, and the fingers open, as if you were going to support the
base of some great bowl, larger than you could easily hold, and sketch
your hand as you see it in the glass, with the points of the fingers
towards you, it will materially help you in understanding the way trees
generally hold out their hands; and if then you will turn yours with its
palm downwards, as if you were going to try to hide something, but with
the fingers expanded, you will get a good type of the action of the
lower boughs in cedars and such other spreading trees.

[Illustration: FIG. 20.]

Fig. 20. will give you a good idea of the simplest way in which these
and other such facts can be rapidly expressed; if you copy it carefully,
you will be surprised to find how the touches all group together, in
expressing the plumy toss of the tree branches, and the springing of the
bushes out of the bank, and the undulation of the ground: note the
careful drawing of the footsteps made by the climbers of the little
mound on the left.[220] It is facsimiled from an etching of Turner's,
and is as good an example as you can have of the use of pure and firm
lines; it will also show you how the particular action in foliage, or
anything else to which you wish to direct attention, may be intensified
by the adjuncts. The tall and upright trees are made to look more tall
and upright still, because their line is continued below by the figure
of the farmer with his stick; and the rounded bushes on the bank are
made to look more rounded because their line is continued in one broad
sweep by the black dog and the boy climbing the wall. These figures are
placed entirely with this object, as we shall see more fully hereafter
when we come to talk about composition; but, if you please, we will not
talk about that yet awhile. What I have been telling you about the
beautiful lines and action of foliage has nothing to do with
composition, but only with fact, and the brief and expressive
representation of fact. But there will be no harm in your looking
forward, if you like to do so, to the account, in Letter III. of the
"Law of Radiation," and reading what it said there about tree growth:
indeed it would in some respects have been better to have said it here
than there, only it would have broken up the account of the principles
of