them as to a quarry or a
wood-pile, or for pleasantness,--the cool spring and the plane-tree
shade, as the ancients did,--or to see fine trees, waterfalls,
mountains. To many persons the beauty of any scene is measured by its
abundance in such _specimens_ of streams, mountains, waterfalls, etc. Of
course the connection is demonstrable enough: one collocation of
features is more readily suggestive of beauty than another. We expect to
find the scenery of a hill-country more attractive than a sand-desert.
But comparing a landscape with a statue, or even Painting generally with
Sculpture, the connection between a happy effect and any definite
arrangement of lines is much looser, and depends on the combination
rather than the ingredients. It is in every one's experience that an
accidental light, or even an accidental susceptibility, will impart to
the meagrest landscape--a bare marsh, a scraggy hill-pasture--a charm of
which the separate features, or the whole, at another time, give no
hint. Often mere bareness, openness, absence of objects, will arouse a
deeper feeling than the most famous scenes. We learn from such
experiences that the difference between one patch of earth and another
is wholly superficial, and indicates not so much anything in it as a
greater or less dulness in us. The celebrated panoramas and points of
view are not the favorite haunts of great painters. They do not need to
travel far for their subjects. Mr. Ruskin tells us that Turner did not
paint the high Alps, nor the _cumulus_, the grandest form of cloud.
Calame gives us the nooks and lanes, the rocks and hills, of
Switzerland, rather than the high peaks; Lambinet, an apple-orchard, a
row of pollard-elms, or a weedy pond,--not cataracts or forests. This is
not affectation or timidity, but an instinct that the famous scenes are
no breaks in the order of Nature,--that what is seen in them is visible
elsewhere as well, only not so obvious, and that the office of Art is
not to parrot what is already distinct, but to reveal it where it is
obscure. This makes the inspiration of the artist; this is the source of
all his power, and alone distinguishes him from the topographer and
view-maker.

This transcendentalism is more evident in Painting, as the later and
more developed form; but it is common to all Art, and may be read also
in the Greek sculptures. The experience of every one who with some
practice of eye comes for the first time to see the best antiqu