ngles, and natural form, but
affected throughout with curvature in each of its parts and joints. That
part of it which was before perpendicular being bent aside, and that
which was before sloping, being bent into still greater inclination, the
angle at which the two parts meet remains the same; or if the strain be
put in the opposite direction, the bough will break long before it loses
its angle. You will find it difficult to bend the angles out of the
youngest sapling, if they be marked; and absolutely impossible, with a
strong bough. You may break it, but you will not destroy its angles. And
if you watch a tree in the wildest storm, you will find that though all
its boughs are bending, none lose their character but the utmost shoots
and sapling spray. Hence Gaspar Poussin, by his bad drawing, does not
make his storm strong, but his tree weak; he does not make his gust
violent, but his boughs of India-rubber.

Sec. 14. Bough-drawing of Titian.

These laws respecting vegetation are so far more imperative than those
which were stated respecting water, that the greatest artist cannot
violate them without danger, because they are laws resulting from
organic structure, which it is always painful to see interrupted; on the
other hand, they have this in common with all laws, that they may be
observed with mathematical precision, yet with no grateful result; the
disciplined eye and the life in the woods are worth more than all
botanical knowledge. For there is that about the growing of the tree
trunk, and that grace in its upper ramification which cannot be taught,
and which cannot even be seen but by eager watchfulness. There is not an
Exhibition passes, but there appear in it hundreds of elaborate
paintings of trees, many of them executed from nature. For three hundred
years back, trees have been drawn with affection by all the civilized
nations of Europe, and yet I repeat boldly, what I before asserted,
that no men but Titian and Turner ever drew the stem of a tree.

Generally, I think, the perception of the muscular qualities of the tree
trunk incomplete, except in men who have studied the human figure, and
in loose expression of those characters, the painter who can draw the
living muscle seldom fails; but the thoroughly peculiar lines belonging
to woody fibre, can only be learned by patient forest study; and hence
in all the trees of the merely historical painters, there is fault of
some kind or another, commonly exa