cal
association of one or two, just enough to mark the specific character
and to give unity and grace, but never enough to repeat in one group
what was done in another--never enough to prevent the eye from feeling
that, however regular and mathematical may be the structure of parts,
what is composed out of them is as various and infinite as any other
part of nature. Nor does this take place in general effect only. Break
off an elm bough, three feet long, in full leaf, and lay it on the table
before you, and try to draw it, leaf for leaf. It is ten to one if in
the whole bough, (provided you do not twist it about as you work,) you
find one form of a leaf exactly like another; perhaps you will not even
have _one_ complete. Every leaf will be oblique, or foreshortened, or
curled, or crossed by another, or shaded by another, or have something
or other the matter with it; and though the whole bough will look
graceful and symmetrical, you will scarcely be able to tell how or why
it does so, since there is not one line of it like another. Now go to
Gaspar Poussin, and take one of his sprays where they come against the
sky; you may count it all round, one, two, three, four, one bunch; five,
six, seven, eight, two bunches; nine, ten, eleven, twelve, three
bunches; with four leaves each,--and such leaves! every one precisely
the same as its neighbor, blunt and round at the end, (where every
forest leaf is sharp, except that of the fig-tree,) tied together by the
roots, and so fastened on to the demoniacal claws above described, one
bunch to each claw.

Sec. 18. Exceeding intricacy of nature's foliage.

But if nature is so various when you have a bough on the table before
you, what must she be when she retires from you, and gives you her whole
mass and multitude? The leaves then at the extremities become as fine
as dust, a mere confusion of points and lines between you and the sky, a
confusion which you might as well hope to draw sea-sand particle by
particle, as to imitate leaf for leaf. This, as it comes down into the
body of the tree, gets closer, but never opaque; it is always
transparent, with crumbling lights in it letting you through to the sky;
then, out of this, come, heavier and heavier, the masses of illumined
foliage, all dazzling and inextricable, save here and there a single
leaf on the extremities; then, under these, you get deep passages of
broken, irregular gloom, passing into transparent, green-lighted, misty