hollows; the twisted stems glancing through them in their pale and
entangled infinity, and the shafted sunbeams, rained from above, running
along the lustrous leaves for an instant; then lost, then caught again
on some emerald bank or knotted root, to be sent up again with a faint
reflex on the white under-sides of dim groups of drooping foliage, the
shadows of the upper boughs running in gray network down the glossy
stems, and resting in quiet checkers upon the glittering earth; but all
penetrable and transparent, and, in proportion, inextricable and
incomprehensible, except where across the labyrinth and the mystery of
the dazzling light and dream-like shadow, falls, close to us, some
solitary spray, some wreath of two or three motionless large leaves, the
type and embodying of all that in the rest we feel and imagine, but can
never see.

Sec. 19. How contradicted by the tree-patterns of G. Poussin.

Now, with thus much of nature in your mind, go to Gaspar Poussin's View
near Albano, in the National Gallery. It is the very subject to unite
all these effects,--a sloping bank shaded with intertwined forest;--and
what has Gaspar given us? A mass of smooth, opaque, varnished brown,
without one interstice, one change of hue, or any vestige of leafy
structure in its interior, or in those parts of it, I should say, which
are intended to represent interior; but out of it, over it rather, at
regular intervals, we have circular groups of greenish touches, always
the same in size, shape, and distance from each other, containing so
exactly the same number of touches each, that you cannot tell one from
another. There are eight or nine and thirty of them, laid over each
other like fish-scales; the shade being most carefully made darker and
darker as it recedes from each until it comes to the edge of the next,
against which it cuts in the same sharp circular line, and then begins
to decline again, until the canvas is covered, with about as much
intelligence or feeling of art as a house-painter has in marbling a
wainscot, or a weaver in repeating an ornamental pattern. What is there
in this, which the most determined prejudice in favor of the old masters
can for a moment suppose to resemble trees? It is exactly what the most
ignorant beginner, trying to make a complete drawing, would lay
down,--exactly the conception of trees which we have in the works of our
worst drawing-masters, where the shade is laid on with the black-lead
a