mplified.

Sec. 3. Which are comparatively rare.

Sec. 4. All repetition is blamable.

Sec. 5. The duty of the painter is the same as that of a preacher.

But the case is widely different, when instead of a principle violated,
we have one extraordinarily carried out or manifested under unusual
circumstances. Though nature is constantly beautiful, she does not
exhibit her highest powers of beauty constantly, for then they would
satiate us and pall upon our senses. It is necessary to their
appreciation that they should be rarely shown. Her finest touches are
things which must be watched for; her most perfect passages of beauty
are the most evanescent. She is constantly doing something beautiful for
us, but it is something which she has not done before and will not do
again; some exhibition of her general powers in particular circumstances
which, if we do not catch at the instant it is passing, will not be
repeated for us. Now they are these evanescent passages of perfected
beauty, these perpetually varied examples of utmost power, which the
artist ought to seek for and arrest. No supposition can be more absurd
than that effects or truths frequently exhibited are more characteristic
of nature than those which are equally necessary by her laws, though
rarer in occurrence. Both the frequent and the rare are parts of the
same great system; to give either exclusively is imperfect truth, and to
repeat the same effect or thought in two pictures is wasted life. What
should we think of a poet who should keep all his life repeating the
same thought in different words? and why should we be more lenient to
the parrot-painter who has learned one lesson from the page of nature,
and keeps stammering it out with eternal repetition without turning the
leaf? Is it less tautology to describe a thing over and over again with
lines, than it is with words? The teaching of nature is as varied and
infinite as it is constant; and the duty of the painter is to watch for
every one of her lessons, and to give (for human life will admit of
nothing more) those in which she has manifested each of her principles
in the most peculiar and striking way. The deeper his research and the
rarer the phenomena he has noted, the more valuable will his works be;
to repeat himself, even in a single instance, is treachery to nature,
for a thousand human lives would not be enough to give one instance of
the perfect manifestation of each of her powers; and as for c