quiet in temperament, has a feeble memory, no invention, and
excessively keen sight. The other is impatient in temperament, has a
memory which nothing escapes, an invention which never rests, and is
comparatively near-sighted.

Set them both free in the same field in a mountain valley. One sees
everything, small and large, with almost the same clearness; mountains
and grasshoppers alike; the leaves on the branches, the veins in the
pebbles, the bubbles in the stream: but he can remember nothing, and
invent nothing. Patiently he sets himself to his mighty task; abandoning
at once all thoughts of seizing transient effects, or giving general
impressions of that which his eyes present to him in microscopical
dissection, he chooses some small portion out of the infinite scene, and
calculates with courage the number of weeks which must elapse before he
can do justice to the intensity of his perceptions, or the fulness of
matter in his subject.

Meantime, the other has been watching the change of the clouds, and the
march of the light along the mountain sides; he beholds the entire scene
in broad, soft masses of true gradation, and the very feebleness of his
sight is in some sort an advantage to him, in making him more sensible
of the aerial mystery of distance, and hiding from him the multitudes of
circumstances which it would have been impossible for him to represent.
But there is not one change in the casting of the jagged shadows along
the hollows of the hills, but it is fixed on his mind for ever; not a
flake of spray has broken from the sea of cloud about their bases, but
he has watched it as it melts away, and could recall it to its lost
place in heaven by the slightest effort of his thoughts. Not only so,
but thousands and thousands of such images, of older scenes, remain
congregated in his mind, each mingling in new associations with those
now visibly passing before him, and these again confused with other
images of his own ceaseless, sleepless imagination, flashing by in
sudden troops. Fancy how his paper will be covered with stray symbols
and blots, and undecipherable shorthand:--as for his sitting down to
"draw from Nature," there was not one of the things which he wished to
represent that stayed for so much as five seconds together: but none of
them escaped, for all that: they are sealed up in that strange
storehouse of his; he may take one of them out, perhaps, this day twenty
years, and paint it in his dark ro