rely or magnificently imaginative or
bearing more distinct evidence of the relative and simultaneous
conception of the parts. Let the reader first cover with his hand the
two trunks that rise against the sky on the right, and ask himself how
any termination of the central mass so _ugly_ as the straight trunk
which he will then painfully see, could have been conceived or admitted
without simultaneous conception of the trunks he has taken away on the
right? Let him again conceal the whole central mass, and leave these two
only, and again ask himself whether anything so ugly as that bare trunk
in the shape of a Y, could have been admitted without reference to the
central mass? Then let him remove from this trunk its two arms, and try
the effect; let him again remove the single trunk on the extreme right;
then let him try the third trunk without the excrescence at the bottom
of it; finally, let him conceal the fourth trunk from the right, with
the slender boughs at the top; he will find in each case that he has
destroyed a feature on which everything else depends, and if proof be
required of the vital power of still smaller features, let him remove
the sunbeam that comes through beneath the faint mass of trees on the
hill in the distance.[53]

It is useless to enter into farther particulars; the reader may be left
to his own close examination of this and of the other works of Turner,
in which he will always find the associative imagination developed in
the most profuse and marvellous modes, especially in the drawing of
foliage and skies, in both of which the presence or absence of the
associative power may best be tested in all artists. I have, however,
confined my present illustrations chiefly to foliage, because other
operations of the imagination besides the associative, interfere
extensively in the treatment of sky.

Sec. 21. The due function of Associative Imagination with respect to
nature.

There remains but one question to be determined relating to this
faculty, what operation, namely, supposing it possessed in high degree,
it has or ought to have in the artist's treatment of natural scenery.

I have just said that nature is always imaginative, but it does not
follow that her imagination is always of high subject, or that the
imagination of all the parts is of a like and sympathetic kind; the
boughs of every bramble bush are imaginatively arranged, so are those of
every oak and cedar; but it does not f