udely the look it would have from above.

[Illustration: FIG. 46.]

212. You may suppose, if you have not already discovered, what
subtleties of perspective and light and shade are involved in the
drawing of these branch-flakes, as you see them in different directions
and actions; now raised, now depressed: touched on the edges by the
wind, or lifted up and bent back so as to show all the white under
surfaces of the leaves shivering in light, as the bottom of a boat rises
white with spray at the surge-crest; or drooping in quietness towards
the dew of the grass beneath them in windless mornings, or bowed down
under oppressive grace of deep-charged snow. Snow time, by the way, is
one of the best for practice in the placing of tree masses; but you will
only be able to understand them thoroughly by beginning with a single
bough and a few leaves placed tolerably even, as in Fig. 38, p. 149.
First one with three leaves, a central and two lateral ones, as at _a_;
then with five, as at _b_, and so on; directing your whole attention to
the expression, both by contour and light and shade, of the boat-like
arrangements, which, in your earlier studies, will have been a good deal
confused, partly owing to your inexperience, and partly to the depth of
shade, or absolute blackness of mass required in those studies.

213. One thing more remains to be noted, and I will let you out of the
wood. You see that in every generally representative figure I have
surrounded the radiating branches with a dotted line: such lines do
indeed terminate every vegetable form; and you see that they are
themselves beautiful curves, which, according to their flow, and the
width or narrowness of the spaces they inclose, characterize the species
of tree or leaf, and express its free or formal action, its grace of
youth or weight of age. So that, throughout all the freedom of her
wildest foliage, Nature is resolved on expressing an encompassing limit;
and marking a unity in the whole tree, caused not only by the rising of
its branches from a common root, but by their joining in one work, and
being bound by a common law. And having ascertained this, let us turn
back for a moment to a point in leaf structure which, I doubt not, you
must already have observed in your earlier studies, but which it is well
to state here, as connected with the unity of the branches in the great
trees. You must have noticed, I should think, that whenever a leaf is
compound,--that