mind lost itself in following her,--now
fringing the dark edge of the shadow with a tufted line of level
forest--now losing it for an instant in a breath of mist--then breaking
it with the white gleaming angle of a narrow brook--then dwelling upon
it again in a gentle, mounded, melting undulation, over the other side
of which she would carry you down into a dusty space of soft, crowded
light, with the hedges, and the paths, and the sprinkled cottages and
scattered trees mixed up and mingled together in one beautiful,
delicate, impenetrable mystery--sparkling and melting, and passing away
into the sky, without one line of distinctness, or one instant of
vacancy.

Sec. 9. The imperative necessity, in landscape painting, of fulness and
finish.

Now it is, indeed, impossible for the painter to follow all this--he
cannot come up to the same degree and order of infinity--but he can give
us a lesser kind of infinity. He has not one-thousandth part of the
space to occupy which nature has; but he can, at least, leave no part of
that space vacant and unprofitable. If nature carries out her minutiae
over miles, he has no excuse for generalizing in inches. And if he will
only give us all he can, if he will give us a fulness as complete and as
mysterious as nature's, we will pardon him for its being the fulness of
a cup instead of an ocean. But we will not pardon him, if, because he
has not the mile to occupy, he will not occupy the inch, and because he
has fewer means at his command, will leave half of those in his power
unexerted. Still less will we pardon him for mistaking the sport of
nature for her labor, and for following her only in her hour of rest,
without observing how she has worked for it. After spending centuries in
raising the forest, and guiding the river, and modelling the mountain,
she exults over her work in buoyancy of spirit, with playful sunbeam and
flying cloud; but the painter must go through the same labor, or he must
not have the same recreation. Let him chisel his rock faithfully, and
tuft his forest delicately, and then we will allow him his freaks of
light and shade, and thank him for them; but we will not be put off with
the play before the lesson--with the adjunct instead of the
essence--with the illustration instead of the fact.

Sec. 10. Breadth is not vacancy.

I am somewhat anticipating my subject here, because I can scarcely help
answering the objections which I know must arise in t