the fascinations of the view
schools, nay, may even delight the geologist and the herbalist, but
utterly disgust the imaginative. This kind of "knowledge" is not
"power" in art. We want not to see water anatomized; the Alps may be
tomahawked and scalped by geologists, yet may they be sorry painters.
And we can point to the general admiration of the world, learned and
unlearned, that a "contemptible fragment of a splintery crag" has
been found to answer all the purposes of an impression of the
greatness of nature, her free, great, and awful forms, and that
depth, shades, power of chiaro-scuro, are found in nature to be
strongest in objects of no very great magnitude; for our vision
requires nearness, and we want not the knowledge that a mountain is
20,000 feet high, to be convinced that it is quite large enough to
crush man and all his works; and that they, who, in their terror of a
greater pressure, would call upon the mountains to cover them, and
the holes of rocks to hide them, would think very little of the
measurement of the mountains, or how the caverns of the earth are
made. Greatness and sublimity are quite other things.

We shall not very systematically carry our views, therefore, into the
detail of these truths, but shall just pick here and there a passage
or so, that may strike us either for its utility or its absurdity.

With regard to truth of tone, he observes--that "the finely-toned
pictures of the old masters are some of the notes of nature played two
or three octaves below her key, the dark objects in the middle
distance having precisely the same relation to the light of the sky
which they have in nature, but the light being necessarily infinitely
lowered, and the mass of the shadow deepened in the same degree. I
have often been struck, when looking at a camera-obscura on a dark
day, with the exact resemblance the image bore to one of the finest
pictures of the old masters." We only ask if, when looking at the
picture in the camera, he did not still recognize nature--and then, if
it was beautiful, we might ask him if it was not _true_; and then when
he asserts our highest light being white paper, and that not white
enough for the light of nature--we would ask if, in the camera, he did
not see the picture on white paper--and if the whiteness of paper be
not the exact whiteness of nature, or white as ordinary nature? But
there is a quality in the light of nature that mere whiteness will not
give, and wh