mposition" be defective; let an emendation
be wrought in its mere arrangement of form; let this emendation be
submitted to every artist in the world; by each will its necessity
be admitted. And even far more than this:--in remedy of the defective
composition, each insulated member of the fraternity would have
suggested the identical emendation.

I repeat that in landscape arrangements alone is the physical nature
susceptible of exaltation, and that, therefore, her susceptibility of
improvement at this one point, was a mystery I had been unable to solve.
My own thoughts on the subject had rested in the idea that the primitive
intention of nature would have so arranged the earth's surface as to
have fulfilled at all points man's sense of perfection in the beautiful,
the sublime, or the picturesque; but that this primitive intention had
been frustrated by the known geological disturbances--disturbances of
form and color--grouping, in the correction or allaying of which lies
the soul of art. The force of this idea was much weakened, however, by
the necessity which it involved of considering the disturbances abnormal
and unadapted to any purpose. It was Ellison who suggested that
they were prognostic of death. He thus explained:--Admit the earthly
immortality of man to have been the first intention. We have then the
primitive arrangement of the earth's surface adapted to his blissful
estate, as not existent but designed. The disturbances were the
preparations for his subsequently conceived deathful condition.

"Now," said my friend, "what we regard as exaltation of the landscape
may be really such, as respects only the moral or human point of view.
Each alteration of the natural scenery may possibly effect a blemish
in the picture, if we can suppose this picture viewed at large--in
mass--from some point distant from the earth's surface, although not
beyond the limits of its atmosphere. It is easily understood that what
might improve a closely scrutinized detail, may at the same time injure
a general or more distantly observed effect. There may be a class of
beings, human once, but now invisible to humanity, to whom, from afar,
our disorder may seem order--our unpicturesqueness picturesque, in a
word, the earth-angels, for whose scrutiny more especially than our own,
and for whose death--refined appreciation of the beautiful, may have
been set in array by God the wide landscape-gardens of the hemispheres."

In the course of