and windless closing of day, a
transitional line such as a tree, mast or spire may be unavailable.
Oppositional spots or lines attracting the vision into the land and thus
diverting it from the horizontals are the only _recourse_. In the shore
view the sun's rays create a series of lines which admirably unite with
the curve of the wagon tracks. The union of sky and land is thus effected
and meanwhile the subject proper has its ruggedness associated with the
graceful compass of these elements.

In fact transitional line is so powerful that unless it contains a part of
the subject it should seldom be used.

In the _"__Annunciation__"_ by Botticelli the introduction of a long
perspective line beyond the figures, continuing the lines of the
foreground, railroads the vision right through the subject, carrying it
out of the picture. If the attention is pinned perforce on the subject,
one feels the interruption and annoyance of this unnecessary landscape.
The whole Italian school of the Renaissance weakened the force of its
portraits and figure pictures by these elaborate settings which they
seemed helpless to govern. In Velasquez we frequently find the
simplification of background which saves the entire interest for the
subject; but even he in his "Spinners" and to a lesser degree in some
other compositions, makes the same error. In the greatest of Rembrandt's
portrait groups, "The Syndics," his problem involved the placement of six
figures. Four are seated at the far side of a table looking toward us,
the fifth, on the near side, rises and looks toward us. His head, higher
than those of the row of four, breaks this line of formality; but the
depth and perspective of the picture is not secured until the figure
standing in the background is added. This produces from the foreground
figure, through one of the seated figures, the transitional line which
pulls the composition forward and backward and makes a circular
composition of what was commenced upon a line sweeping across the entire
canvas.

The hillside entitled "Pathless," by Horsley Hinton is a subject easily
passed in nature as ordinary, which has been however unified and made
available through the understanding of this principle. So much of an
artist is its author that I can see him down on his knees cutting out the
mass of blackberry stems so that the two or three required in the
foreground should strike as lines across the demi-dark of the lower middle
spa