try to draw it, leaf for
leaf. It is ten to one if in the whole bough (provided you do not twist
it about as you work) you find one form of leaf exactly like another;
perhaps you will not even have _one_ complete. Every leaf will be
oblique, or foreshortened, or curled, or crossed by another, or shaded
by another, or have something or other the matter with it; and though
the whole bough will look graceful, and symmetrical, you will scarcely
be able to tell how or why it does so, since there is not one line of it
like another....

But if Nature is so various when you have a bough on the table before
you, what must she be when she retires from you, and gives you her whole
mass and multitude? The leaves then at the extremities become as fine as
dust, a mere confusion of points and lines between you and the sky, a
confusion which you might as well hope to draw sea-sand particle by
particle, as to imitate leaf for leaf. This, as it comes down into the
body of the tree, gets closer, but never opaque; it is always
transparent, with crumbling lights in it letting you through to the sky;
then, out of this, come, heavier and heavier, the masses of illumined
foliage, all dazzling and inextricable, save here and there a single
leaf on the extremities; then, under these, you get deep passages of
broken irregular gloom, passing into transparent, green-lighted, misty
hollows; the twisted stems glancing through them in their pale and
entangled infinity, and the shafted sunbeams, rained from above, running
along the lustrous leaves for an instant; then lost, then caught again
on some emerald bank or knotted root, to be sent up again with a faint
reflex on the white under-sides of dim groups of drooping foliage, the
shadows of the upper boughs running in grey network down the glossy
stems, and resting in quiet chequers upon the glittering earth; but all
penetrable and transparent, and, in proportion, inextricable and
incomprehensible, except where across the labyrinth and the mystery of
the dazzling light and dream-like shadow, falls, close to us, some
solitary spray, some wreath of two or three motionless, large leaves,
the type and embodying of all that in the rest we feel and imagine, but
can never see.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 70: From "Modern Painters," Vol. I, 1843, Pt. II, Sec. VI
Chapter I.]

B. WATER[71]

Of all inorganic substances, acting in their own proper nature, and
without assistance or combination, water is