of mind is not shown by admitting small things, but by
making small things great under its influence. He who can take no
interest in what is small, will take false interest in what is great;
he who cannot make a bank sublime, will make a mountain ridiculous.

Sec. 29. The unison of all in the ideal foregrounds of the Academy
pictures.

Sec. 30. And the great lesson to be received from all.

It is not until we have made ourselves acquainted with these simple
facts of form, as they are illustrated by the slighter works of Turner,
that we can become at all competent to enjoy the combination of all, in
such works as the Mercury and Argus, or Bay of Baiae, in which the mind
is at first bewildered by the abundant outpouring of the master's
knowledge. Often as I have paused before these noble works, I never felt
on returning to them as if I had ever seen them before; for their
abundance is so deep and various that the mind, according to its own
temper at the time of seeing, perceives some new series of truths
rendered in them, just as it would on revisiting a natural scene; and
detects new relations and associations of these truths which set the
whole picture in a different light at every return to it. And this
effect is especially caused by the management of the foreground; for the
more marked objects of the picture may be taken one by one, and thus
examined and known; but the foregrounds of Turner are so united in all
their parts that the eye cannot take them by divisions, but is guided
from stone to stone, and bank to bank, discovering truths totally
different in aspect, according to the direction in which it approaches
them, and approaching them in a different direction, and viewing them as
a part of a new system, every time that it begins its course at a new
point. One lesson, however, we are invariably taught by all, however
approached or viewed,--that the work of the Great Spirit of nature is as
deep and unapproachable in the lowest as in the noblest objects,--that
the Divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every
lowly bank and mouldering stone, as in the lifting of the pillars of
heaven, and settling the foundation of the earth; and that to the
rightly perceiving mind, there is the same infinity, the same majesty,
the same power, the same unity, and the same perfection, manifest in the
casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the mouldering
of the dust as in the kindli