Nature would have us, consider
what advantages would follow. The colors of marble are mingled for us
just as if on a prepared palette. They are of all shades and hues
(except bad ones), some being united and even, some broken, mixed, and
interrupted, in order to supply, as far as possible, the want of the
painter's power of breaking and mingling the color with the brush. But
there is more in the colors than this delicacy of adaptation. There is
history in them. By the manner in which they are arranged in every piece
of marble, they record the means by which that marble has been produced,
and the successive changes through which it has passed. And in all their
veins and zones, and flame-like stainings, or broken and disconnected
lines, they write various legends, never untrue, of the former political
state of the mountain kingdom to which they belonged, of its infirmities
and fortitudes, convulsions and consolidations, from the beginning of
time.

Now, if we were never in the habit of seeing anything but real marbles,
this language of theirs would soon begin to be understood; that is to
say, even the least observant of us would recognize such and such stones
as forming a peculiar class, and would begin to inquire where they came
from, and, at last, take some feeble interest in the main question, Why
they were only to be found in that or the other place, and how they
came to make a part of this mountain, and not of that? And in a little
while, it would not be possible to stand for a moment at a shop door,
leaning against the pillars of it, without remembering or questioning of
something well worth the memory or the inquiry, touching the hills of
Italy, or Greece, or Africa, or Spain; and we should be led on from
knowledge to knowledge, until even the unsculptured walls of our streets
became to us volumes as precious as those of our libraries.

Sec. XLIII. But the moment we admit imitation of marble, this source of
knowledge is destroyed. None of us can be at the pains to go through the
work of verification. If we knew that every colored stone we saw was
natural, certain questions, conclusions, interests, would force
themselves upon us without any effort of our own; but we have none of us
time to stop in the midst of our daily business, to touch and pore over,
and decide with painful minuteness of investigation, whether such and
such a pillar be stucco or stone. And the whole field of this knowledge,
which Nature intende