red, what subtleties of
perspective and light and shade are involved in the drawing of these
branch-flakes, as you see them in different directions and actions; now
raised, now depressed; touched on the edges by the wind, or lifted up
and bent back so as to show all the white under surfaces of the leaves
shivering in light, as the bottom of a boat rises white with spray at
the surge-crest; or drooping in quietness towards the dew of the grass
beneath them in windless mornings, or bowed down under oppressive grace
of deep-charged snow. Snow time, by the way, is one of the best for
practice in the placing of tree masses; but you will only be able to
understand them thoroughly by beginning with a single bough and a few
leaves placed tolerably even, as in Fig. 38. page 372. First one with
three leaves, a central and two lateral ones, as at _a_; then with five,
as at _b_, and so on; directing your whole attention to the expression,
both by contour and light and shade, of the boat-like arrangements,
which in your earlier studies, will have been a good deal confused,
partly owing to your inexperience, and partly to the depth of shade, or
absolute blackness of mass required in those studies.

One thing more remains to be noted, and I will let you out of the wood.
You see that in every generally representative figure I have surrounded
the radiating branches with a dotted line: such lines do indeed
terminate every vegetable form; and you see that they are themselves
beautiful curves, which, according to their flow, and the width or
narrowness of the spaces they enclose, characterize the species of tree
or leaf, and express its free or formal action, its grace of youth or
weight of age. So that, throughout all the freedom of her wildest
foliage, Nature is resolved on expressing an encompassing limit; and
marking a unity in the whole tree, caused not only by the rising of its
branches from a common root, but by their joining in one work, and being
bound by a common law. And having ascertained this, let us turn back for
a moment to a point in leaf structure which, I doubt not, you must
already have observed in your earlier studies, but which it is well to
state here, as connected with the unity of the branches in the great
trees. You must have noticed, I should think, that whenever a leaf is
compound,--that is to say, divided into other leaflets which in any way
repeat or imitate the form of the whole leaf,--those leaflets are not
s