ollows up this praise is so perfect a bit of
word-painting, that I cannot refrain from writing it down here. 'The
houses are dead square masses, with a light side and a dark side, and
black touches for windows. There is no suggestion of anything in any of
the spaces, the light wall is dead grey, the dark wall dead grey, and
the windows dead black. How differently would nature have treated us.
She would have let us see the Indian corn hanging on the walls, and the
image of the Virgin of the tiled eaves, and the deep ribbed tiles with
the doves upon them, and the carved Roman capital built into the wall,
and the white and blue stripes of the mattresses stuffed out of the
windows, and the flapping corners of the neat blinds. All would have
been there; not as such, not like the corn, nor blinds, nor tiles, not
to be comprehended nor understood, but a confusion of yellow and black
spots and strokes, carried far too fine for the eye to follow;
microscopic in its minuteness, and filling every atom and space with
mystery, out of which would have arranged itself the general impression
of truth and life.' Once more, Mr Ruskin freely admits that 'all the
landscape of Nicolas Poussin is imagination.'

Mr Ruskin's first definition of ideal landscape is in this manner. Every
different tree and leaf, every bud, has a perfect form, which, were it
not for disease or accident, it would have attained; just as every
individual human face has an ideal form, which but for sin and suffering
it would present: and the ideal landscape-painter has realized the
perfect form, and offers it to the world, and that in a sense quite
distinct from the fallacy of improving nature.

But I wish to take my readers further into imaginative landscape, and to
show it to them, if possible, under additional lights. I despair of
succeeding if I cannot do it by one or two simple examples. In passing
through a gallery we may stop before a picture to be struck, almost
startled, by the exact copy which it presents of some scene in nature;
how like the clouds in the sky, the leaves on the trees, the very
plumage of the birds! But pass on to another picture which may or may
not have the same exact likeness, and we are possessed with quite
another feeling; instead of being merely surprised by the cleverness of
the imitation, we feel a thrill of delight at a reproduction of nature.
In this picture there are not only the clouds we remember, but we can
almost feel the sha