g of landscapes,"
said he, writing in 1829 to his friend Archdeacon Fisher, "to be very
rare, and difficult of attainment. It is by far the most lovely department
of painting, as well as of poetry." "Painting," he says in another letter,
"is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate my careless
boyhood with all that lies on the banks of the Stour. These scenes made me
a painter, and I am grateful." "Whatever may be thought of my art, it is
my own; and I would rather possess a freehold, though but a cottage, than
live in a palace belonging to another."

Thus feeling intensely the charm of nature--and confident that by the
vivid representation of pastoral English landscape, he could enable it to
exercise upon other minds something of the same spell which it produced on
his own--his whole efforts, as he says himself, were directed to forget
pictures, and to catch if possible the precise aspect which the scenery
which he endeavours to portray presented at the moment of study. And here
particularly it is, that the genius of Constable is visible. A man of less
reach of mind, beginning, as he did, with this minute attention to the
vocabulary of detail, would probably have ended there. We should have had
a set of pictures perfectly painted in parts, but forming no consistent
whole. All general effect would have been sacrificed to the impression to
be produced by particulars. The very love of nature often leads to this
error--as in the once-popular Glover, and many others. But no one had a
fuller sense than Constable, that by this means pictures never can be
created; that literal imitation of the details of nature is a delusion;
because not only is the medium we use entirely inadequate, but paint as we
may, with the most microscopic minuteness of detail, the thousand little
touches and reflexes of light and shade, which soften and harmonize all
things in nature, are essentially evanescent, and incapable of being
transferred to canvass. He felt that a certain _substitute_ for nature,
awakening a corresponding impression upon the mind, was all that he could
be afforded by painting--that the spirit and not the letter of her
handwriting was to be imitated. The object of painting, as he himself
expressed it, "was to realize, but not to feign: to remind, but not to
deceive."

Hence, while he perfectly succeeded in catching the spirit of the spot--so
much so, that Mr Leslie, visiting the scenes of his pictures for the first