pass to some other object, which
rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example a well-laid
garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying out of gardens. I
should think fire the best thing in the world, if I were not acquainted
with air, and water, and earth. For it is the right and property of
all natural objects, of all genuine talents, of all native properties
whatsoever, to be for their moment the top of the world. A squirrel
leaping from bough to bough and making the Wood but one wide tree
for his pleasure, fills the eye not less than a lion,--is beautiful,
self-sufficing, and stands then and there for nature. A good ballad
draws my ear and heart whilst I listen, as much as an epic has done
before. A dog, drawn by a master, or a litter of pigs, satisfies and is
a reality not less than the frescoes of Angelo. From this succession
of excellent objects we learn at last the immensity of the world,
the opulence of human nature, which can run out to infinitude in any
direction. But I also learn that what astonished and fascinated me in
the first work astonished me in the second work also; that excellence of
all things is one.

The office of painting and sculpture seems to be merely initial. The
best pictures can easily tell us their last secret. The best pictures
are rude draughts of a few of the miraculous dots and lines and dyes
which make up the ever-changing "landscape with figures" amidst which
we dwell. Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs.
When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness, to
grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting
teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and as
I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless
opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free
to choose out of the possible forms. If he can draw every thing, why
draw any thing? and then is my eye opened to the eternal picture which
nature paints in the street, with moving men and children, beggars and
fine ladies, draped in red and green and blue and gray; long-haired,
grizzled, white-faced, black-faced, wrinkled, giant, dwarf, expanded,
elfish,--capped and based by heaven, earth and sea.

A gallery of sculpture teaches more austerely the same lesson. As
picture teaches the coloring, so sculpture the anatomy of form. When
I have seen fine statues and afterwards enter a public as