erfect a
conception, would have managed it in its details. Claude has permitted
us to see every battlement, and the first impulse we feel upon looking
at the picture is to count how many there are. Nature would have given
us a peculiar confused roughness of the upper lines, a multitude of
intersections and spots, which we should have known from experience was
indicative of battlements, but which we might as well have thought of
creating as of counting. Claude has given you the walls below in one
dead void of uniform gray. There is nothing to be seen, nor felt, nor
guessed at in it; it is gray paint or gray shade, whichever you may
choose to call it, but it is nothing more. Nature would have let you
see, nay, would have compelled you to see, thousands of spots and lines,
not one to be absolutely understood or accounted for, but yet all
characteristic and different from each other; breaking lights on
shattered stones, vague shadows from waving vegetation, irregular stains
of time and weather, mouldering hollows, sparkling casements--all would
have been there--none, indeed, seen as such, none comprehensible or like
themselves, but all visible; little shadows, and sparkles, and
scratches, making that whole space of color a transparent, palpitating,
various infinity.

Sec. 8. And G. Poussin.

Or take one of Poussin's extreme distances, such as that in the
Sacrifice of Isaac. It is luminous, retiring, delicate and perfect in
tone, and is quite complete enough to deceive and delight the careless
eye to which all distances are alike; nay, it is perfect and masterly,
and absolutely right if we consider it as a sketch,--as a first plan of
a distance, afterwards to be carried out in detail. But we must remember
that all these alternate spaces of gray and gold are not the landscape
itself, but the treatment of it--not its substance, but its light and
shade. They are just what nature would cast over it, and write upon it
with every cloud, but which she would cast in play, and without
carefulness, as matters of the very smallest possible importance. All
her work and her attention would be given to bring out from underneath
this, and through this, the forms and the material character which this
can only be valuable to illustrate, not to conceal. Every one of those
broad spaces she would linger over in protracted delight, teaching you
fresh lessons in every hairsbreadth of it, and pouring her fulness of
invention into it, until the