profound and omnivorous reverie overflows the mind; it devours its
objects or is absorbed into them, and the mood which this active
self-alienation brings with it is called the spirit of the scene, the
sentiment of the landscape.

Perception and art, in this phase, easily grow mystical; they are
readily lost in primordial physical sympathies. Although at first a
certain articulation and discursiveness may be retained in the picture,
so that the things seen in their atmosphere and relations may still be
distinguished clearly, the farther the impartial absorption in them
goes, the more what is inter-individual rises and floods the individual
over. All becomes light and depth and air, and those particular objects
threaten to vanish which we had hoped to make luminous, breathing, and
profound. The initiated eye sees so many nameless tints and surfaces,
that it can no longer select any creative limits for things. There cease
to be fixed outlines, continuous colours, or discrete existences in
nature.

[Sidenote: Its threatened dissolution.]

An artist, however, cannot afford to forget that even in such a case
units and divisions would have to be introduced by him into his work. A
man, in falling back on immediate reality, or immediate appearance, may
well feel his mind's articulate grammar losing its authority, but that
grammar must evidently be reasserted if from the immediate he ever
wishes to rise again to articulate mind; and art, after all, exists for
the mind and must speak humanly. If we crave something else, we have not
so far to go: there is always the infinite about us and the animal
within us to absolve us from human distinctions.

Moreover, it is not quite true that the immediate has no real diversity.
It evidently suggests the ideal terms into which we divide it, and it
sustains our apprehension itself, with all the diversities this may
create. To what I call right and left, light and darkness, a real
opposition must correspond in any reality which is at all relevant to my
experience; so that I should fail to integrate my impression, and to
absorb the only reality that concerns me, if I obliterated those points
of reference which originally made the world figured and visible. Space
remains absolutely dark, for all the infinite light which we may declare
to be radiating through it, until this light is concentrated in one body
or reflected from another; and a landscape cannot be so much as vaporous
unless mis