ions must be toys, and its
patrons must be children.

My purpose then, in the present work, is to demonstrate the utter
falseness both of the facts and principles; the imperfection of
material, and error of arrangement, on which works such as these are
based; and to insist on the necessity, as well as the dignity, of an
earnest, faithful, loving, study of nature as she is, rejecting with
abhorrence all that man has done to alter and modify her. And the praise
which, in this first portion of the work, is given to many English
artists, would be justifiable on this ground only, that although
frequently with little power and desultory effort, they have yet, in an
honest and good heart, received the word of God from clouds, and leaves,
and waves, and kept it,[N] and endeavored in humility to render to the
world that purity of impression which can alone render the result of
art an instrument of good, or its labor deserving of gratitude.

If, however, I shall have frequent occasion to insist on the necessity
of this heartfelt love of, and unqualified submission to, the teaching
of nature, it will be no less incumbent upon me to reprobate the
careless rendering of casual impression, and the mechanical copyism of
unimportant subject, which are too frequently visible in our modern
school.[O] Their lightness and desultoriness of intention, their
meaningless multiplication of unstudied composition, and their want of
definiteness and loftiness of aim, bring discredit on their whole system
of study, and encourage in the critic the unhappy prejudice that the
field and the hill-side are less fit places of study than the gallery
and the garret. Not every casual idea caught from the flight of a shower
or the fall of a sunbeam, not every glowing fragment of harvest light,
nor every flickering dream of copsewood coolness, is to be given to the
world as it came, unconsidered, incomplete, and forgotten by the artist
as soon as it has left his easel. That only should be considered a
picture, in which the spirit, (not the materials, observe,) but the
animating emotion of many such studies is concentrated, and exhibited by
the aid of long-studied, painfully-chosen forms; idealized in the right
sense of the word, not by audacious liberty of that faculty of degrading
God's works which man calls his "imagination," but by perfect assertion
of entire knowledge of every part and character and function of the
object, and in which the details are comp