soul of the cow; which I saw there plainly
walking before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and
silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all the
beasts. But though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the
landscape, it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the
best out of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about
the old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care
very much about Nature because they did not describe it much.

They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills; but
they sat on the great hills to write it. They gave out much less about
Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They painted the white
robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had
stared all day. They blazoned the shields of their paladins with the
purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets. The greenness of a thousand
green leaves clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The
blueness of a score of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the
Virgin. The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.

.....

But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on the brown paper, it began
to dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that
a most exquisite and essential chalk, behind. I searched all my pockets,
but I could not find any white chalk. Now, those who are acquainted
with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art
of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential. I
cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the wise
and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is this, that white
is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and
affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so
to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows
white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities
of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is
exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality
is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the
avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like
pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or
sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive
thing like the sun, which one has eit