nd stump, and every human power exerted to make it look like a
kitchen-grate well polished.

Sec. 20. How followed by Creswick.

Oppose to this the drawing even of our somewhat inferior tree-painters.
I will not insult Harding by mentioning his work after it, but take
Creswick, for instance, and match one of his sparkling bits of green
leafage with this tree-pattern of Poussin's. I do not say there is not a
dignity and impressiveness about the old landscape, owing to its
simplicity; and I am very far from calling Creswick's good
tree-painting; it is false in color and deficient in mass and freedom,
and has many other defects, but it is the work of a man who has sought
earnestly for truth; and who, with one thought or memory of nature in
his heart, could look at the two landscapes, and receive Poussin's with
ordinary patience? Take Creswick in black and white, where he is
unembarrassed by his fondness for pea-green, the illustrations, for
instance, to the Nut-brown Maid, in the Book of English Ballads. Look at
the intricacy and fulness of the dark oak foliage where it bends over
the brook, see how you can go through it, and into it, and come out
behind it to the quiet bit of sky. Observe the gray, aerial transparency
of the stunted copse on the left, and the entangling of the boughs where
the light near foliage detaches itself. Above all, note the forms of the
masses of light. Not things like scales or shells, sharp at the edge and
flat in the middle, but irregular and rounded, stealing in and out
accidentally from the shadow, and presenting, as the masses of all trees
do, in general outline, a resemblance to the specific forms of the
leaves of which they are composed. Turn over the page, and look into
the weaving of the foliage and sprays against the dark night-sky, how
near they are, yet how untraceable; see how the moonlight creeps up
underneath them, trembling and shivering on the silver boughs above;
note also, the descending bit of ivy on the left, of which only two
leaves are made out, and the rest is confusion, or tells only in the
moonlight like faint flakes of snow.

Sec. 21. Perfect unity in nature's foliage.

But nature observes another principle in her foliage more important even
than its intricacy. She always secures an exceeding harmony and repose.
She is _so_ intricate that her minuteness of parts becomes to the eye,
at a little distance, one united veil or cloud of leaves, to destroy the
evenness