nd which he has
endeavored to excite in the spectator, and which in reality would have
seen in every trunk and bough, as it penetrated into the deeper thicket,
the object of its terror.

Sec. 15. Imagination addresses itself to imagination.

Instances from the works of Tintoret.

It is nevertheless evident, that however suggestive the work or picture
may be, it cannot have effect unless we are ourselves both watchful of
its very hint, and capable of understanding and carrying it out, and
although I think that this power of continuing or accepting the
direction of feeling given is less a peculiar gift, like that of the
original seizing, than a faculty dependent on attention, and improvable
by cultivation; yet, to a certain extent, the imaginative work will not,
I think, be rightly esteemed except by a mind of some corresponding
power; not but that there is an intense enjoyment in minds of feeble yet
light conception in the help and food they get from those of stronger
thought; but a certain imaginative susceptibility is at any rate
necessary, and above all things, earnestness and feeling, so that
assuredly a work of high conceptive dignity will be always
incomprehensible and valueless except in those who go to it in earnest
and give it time; and this is peculiarly the case when the imagination
acts not merely on the immediate subject, nor in giving a fanciful and
peculiar character to prominent objects, as we have just seen, but
busies itself throughout in expressing occult and far-sought sympathies
in every minor detail, of which action the most sublime instances are
found in the works of Tintoret, whose intensity of imagination is such
that there is not the commonest subject to which he will not attach a
range of suggestiveness almost limitless, nor a stone, leaf, or shadow,
nor anything so small, but he will give it meaning and oracular voice.

Sec. 16. The Entombment.

In the centre of the gallery at Parma, there is a canvas of Tintoret's,
whose sublimity of conception and grandeur of color are seen in the
highest perfection, by their opposition to the morbid and vulgar
sentimentalism of Correggio. It is an Entombment of Christ, with a
landscape distance, of whose technical composition and details I shall
have much to say hereafter, at present I speak only of the thought it is
intended to convey. An ordinary or unimaginative painter would have made
prominent, among his objects of landscape, such as might nat