s would be lost in shade,--that this far greater
space, and this far more complicated arrangement, should be all summed
up into one round mass, with one swell of white, and one flat side of
unbroken gray, is considered an evidence of the sublimest powers in the
artist of generalization and breadth. Now it may be broad, it may be
grand, it may be beautiful, artistical, and in every way desirable. I
don't say it is not--I merely say it is a concentration of every kind of
falsehood: it is depriving heaven of its space, clouds of their
buoyancy, winds of their motion, and distance of its blue.

Sec. 13. Imperfect conceptions of this size and extent in ancient
landscape.

This is done, more or less, by all the old masters, without an
exception.[32] Their idea of clouds was altogether similar; more or less
perfectly carried out, according to their power of hand and accuracy of
eye, but universally the same in conception. It was the idea of a
comparatively small, round, puffed-up white body, irregularly associated
with other round and puffed-up white bodies, each with a white light
side, and a gray dark side, and a soft reflected light, floating a great
way below a blue dome. Such is the idea of a cloud formed by most
people; it is the first, general, uncultivated notion of what we see
every day. People think of the clouds as about as large as they
look--forty yards over, perhaps; they see generally that they are solid
bodies subject to the same laws as other solid bodies, roundish,
whitish, and apparently suspended a great way under a high blue
concavity. So that these ideas be tolerably given with smooth paint,
they are content, and call it nature. How different it is from anything
that nature ever did, or ever will do, I have endeavored to show; but I
cannot, and do not, expect the contrast to be fully felt, unless the
reader will actually go out on days when, either before or after rain,
the clouds arrange themselves into vigorous masses, and after arriving
at something like a conception of their distance and size, from the mode
in which they retire over the horizon, will for himself trace and watch
their varieties of form and outline, as mass rises over mass in their
illuminated bodies. Let him climb from step to step over their craggy
and broken slopes, let him plunge into the long vistas of immeasurable
perspective, that guide back to the blue sky; and when he finds his
imagination lost in their immensity, an