ks, and eternal
sensation of tameless power, can scarcely but be angered when Claude
bids him stand still on some paltry, chipped and chiselled quay with
porters and wheelbarrows running against him, to watch a weak, rippling
bound and barriered water, that has not strength enough in one of its
waves to upset the flower-pots on the wall, or even to fling one jet of
spray over the confining stone. A man accustomed to the strength and
glory of God's mountains, with their soaring and radiant pinnacles, and
surging sweeps of measureless distance, kingdoms in their valleys, and
climates upon their crests, can scarcely but be angered when Salvator
bids him stand still under some contemptible fragment of splintery crag,
which an Alpine snow-wreath would smother in its first swell, with a
stunted bush or two growing out of it, and a volume of manufactory smoke
for a sky. A man accustomed to the grace and infinity of nature's
foliage, with every vista a cathedral, and every bough a revelation, can
scarcely but be angered when Poussin mocks him with a black round mass
of impenetrable paint, diverging into feathers instead of leaves, and
supported on a stick instead of a trunk. The fact is, there is one thing
wanting in all the doing of these men, and that is the very virtue by
which the work of human mind chiefly rises above that of the
Daguerreotype or Calotype, or any other mechanical means that ever have
been or may be invented, Love: There is no evidence of their ever having
gone to nature with any thirst, or received from her such emotion as
could make them, even for an instant, lose sight of themselves; there is
in them neither earnestness nor humility; there is no simple or honest
record of any single truth; none of the plain words nor straight efforts
that men speak and make when they once feel.

Sec. 6. Inadequacy of the landscape of Titian and Tintoret.

Nor is it only by the professed landscape painters that the great
verities of the material world are betrayed: Grand as are the motives
of landscape in the works of the earlier and mightier men, there is yet
in them nothing approaching to a general view nor complete rendering of
natural phenomena; not that they are to be blamed for this; for they
took out of nature that which was fit for their purpose, and their
mission was to do no more; but we must be cautious to distinguish that
imaginative abstraction of landscape which alone we find in them, from
the entire stat