ing--every permission given to him to spoil his pocketbook with
sixths of sunshine and sevenths of shade, and other such fractional
sublimities, is so much more difficulty laid in the way of his ever
becoming a master; and that none are in the right road to real
excellence, but those who are struggling to render the simplicity,
purity, and inexhaustible variety of nature's own chiaroscuro in open,
cloudless daylight, giving the expanse of harmonious light--the
speaking, decisive shadow--and the exquisite grace, tenderness, and
grandeur of aerial opposition of local color and equally illuminated
lines. No chiaroscuro is so difficult as this; and none so noble,
chaste, or impressive. On this part of the subject, however, I must not
enlarge at present. I wish now only to speak of those great principles
of chiaroscuro, which nature observes, even when she is most working for
effect--when she is playing with thunder-clouds and sunbeams, and
throwing one thing out and obscuring another, with the most marked
artistical feeling and intention;--even then, she never forgets her
great rule, to give precisely the same quantity of deepest shade which
she does of highest light, and no more; points of the one answering to
points of the other, and both vividly conspicuous and separated from all
the rest of the landscape.

Sec. 12. The sharp separation of nature's lights from her middle tint.

And it is most singular that this separation, which is the great source
of brilliancy in nature, should not only be unobserved, but absolutely
forbidden by our great writers on art, who are always talking about
connecting the light with the shade by _imperceptible gradations_. Now
so surely as this is done, all sunshine is lost, for imperceptible
gradation from light to dark is the characteristic of objects seen out
of sunshine, in what is, in landscape, shadow. Nature's principle of
getting light is the direct reverse. She will cover her whole landscape
with middle tint, in which she will have as many gradations as you
please, and a great many more than you can paint; but on this middle
tint she touches her extreme lights, and extreme darks, isolated and
sharp, so that the eye goes to them directly, and feels them to be
key-notes of the whole composition. And although the dark touches are
less attractive than the light ones, it is not because they are less
distinct, but because they exhibit nothing; while the bright touches are
in parts where