--though we look
with delight on the work when done by others--the picture without the
process--the product of genius without thought of its mortal
instruments. We work in words, and words are, in good truth, images,
feelings, thoughts; and of these the outer world, as well as the inner,
is composed, let materialists say what they will. Prose is poetry--we
have proved _that_ to the satisfaction of all mankind. Look! we beseech
you--how a little Loch seems to rise up with its tall heronry--a central
isle--and all its sylvan braes, till it lies almost on a level with the
floor of our Cave, from which in three minutes we could hobble on our
crutch down the inclining greensward to the Bay of Waterlilies, and in
that canoe be afloat among the Swans. All birches--not any other kind of
tree--except a few pines, on whose tops the large nests repose--and here
and there a still bird standing as if asleep. What a place for Roes!

The great masters, were their eyes to fall on our idle words, might
haply smile--not contemptuously--on our ignorance of art--but graciously
on our knowledge of nature. All we have to do, then, is to learn the
theory and practice of art--and assuredly we should forthwith set about
doing so, had we any reasonable prospect of living long enough to open
an exhibition of pictures from our own easel. As it is, we must be
contented with that Gallery, richer than the Louvre, which our
imagination has furnished with masterpieces beyond all price or
purchase--many of them touched with her own golden finger, the rest the
work of high but not superior hands. Imagination, who limns in air, has
none of those difficulties to contend with that always beset, and often
baffle, artists in oils or waters. At a breath she can modify, alter,
obliterate, or restore; at a breath she can colour vacuity with rainbow
hues--crown the cliff with its castle--swing the drawbridge over the
gulf profound--through a night of woods roll the river along on its
moonlit reach--by fragmentary cinctures of mist and cloud, so girdle one
mountain that it has the power of a hundred--giant rising above giant,
far and wide, as if the mighty multitude, in magnificent and triumphant
disorder, were indeed scaling heaven.

To speak more prosaically, every true and accepted lover of nature
regards her with a painter's as well as a poet's eye. He breaks not down
any scene rudely, and with "many an oft-repeated stroke;" but
unconsciously and insensibly h