with rosy
light on all their crags.

I should think the reader cannot but feel the kind of harmony there is
in this composition; the entire purpose of the painter to give us the
impression of wild, yet gentle, country life, monotonous as the
succession of the noiseless waves, patient and enduring as the rocks;
but peaceful, and full of health and quiet hope, and sanctified by the
pure mountain air and baptismal dew of heaven, falling softly between
days of toil and nights of innocence.

All noble composition of this kind can be reached only by instinct: you
cannot set yourself to arrange such a subject; you may see it, and seize
it, at all times, but never laboriously invent it. And your power of
discerning what is best in expression, among natural subjects, depends
wholly on the temper in which you keep your own mind; above all, on your
living so much alone as to allow it to become acutely sensitive in its
own stillness. The noisy life of modern days is wholly incompatible with
any true perception of natural beauty. If you go down into Cumberland by
the railroad, live in some frequented hotel, and explore the hills with
merry companions, however much you may enjoy your tour or their
conversation, depend upon it you will never choose so much as one
pictorial subject rightly; you will not see into the depth of any. But
take knapsack and stick, walk towards the hills by short day's
journeys--ten or twelve miles a day--taking a week from some
starting-place sixty or seventy miles away: sleep at the pretty little
wayside inns, or the rough village ones; then take the hills as they
tempt you, following glen or shore as your eye glances or your heart
guides, wholly scornful of local fame or fashion, and of everything
which it is the ordinary traveller's duty to see or pride to do. Never
force yourself to admire anything when you are not in the humour; but
never force yourself away from what you feel to be lovely, in search of
anything better: and gradually the deeper scenes of the natural world
will unfold themselves to you in still increasing fulness of passionate
power; and your difficulty will be no more to seek or to compose
subjects, but only to choose one from among the multitude of melodious
thoughts with which you will be haunted, thoughts which will of course
be noble or original in proportion to your own depth of character and
general power of mind: for it is not so much by the consideration you
give to any single