them the
dark cedars, the straggling foot-path and steep cliffs. I am impressed
with the sweep of the cloud form pressing over and around them. With
my eyes closed I paint this on my brain, and if I am great enough and
wide enough and deep enough I can subdue my personality and forget my
surroundings, and when opportunity offers I can express upon my canvas
the few salient facts which impressed me and should impress my fellow
men. If it is the silvery light of the morning, I am Corot; if the
day is gone and across the cool lagoon I see the ripple amid the tall
grass catching the fading color of the warm sky, I am Daubigny; if a
gray mist hangs over the hillside and the patches of snow half melted
express the warmth and mellowness of the coming spring, I am our own
Inness.

Perhaps, however, I am not content. I am overburdened with curiosity.
I say to myself: "What sort of trees, pine or cedar?" I think, pine,
but I am uneasy lest they should be hemlock. Were the rocks all
perpendicular, or did not detached bowlders line the path? About the
clouds, were they not some small cirri beneath the zenith? My memory
is so bad--and so I stop the train and go back. Just as I expected.
The trees were spruce and the rocks were grass-grown and full of
fissures, and so I begin to paint and continue. I get the bark on the
trees, and the foliage until each particular leaf stands on end, and
the strata of the cliffs, and the very sand on the path. I crowd into
my canvas geology, botany, and the laws governing cloud forms.

Being an ordinary mortal, my curiosity, my telescopic eyes, my
magnifying-glass of vision, my love of truth, my positive conviction
that it is a spruce and should not be painted as a pine, except
through rank perjury, all these forces together have undermined my
impression or, like thorns, have grown up and choked it. Being honest,
I am ready to confess that before returning to the spot I was in doubt
about the pine. But I am still ready to affirm that what I have
labored over is the exact counterfeit and presentment of nature, and
equally willing to denounce the public for not seeing it as I do. I
forget that I have been a boor and a vulgarian--that I have been
invited to a feast and that I have pried into mysteries which my
goddess would veil from my sight; that I have had the impertinence to
bring my own personal advice into the discussion; that I have insisted
that fissures, and leaves, and sand, and infinite det