rom some happy
expatiation in their own domains. But the grainer must think of what he
is doing; and veritable attention and care, and occasionally
considerable skill, are consumed in the doing of a more absolute nothing
than I can name in any other department of painful idleness. I know not
anything so humiliating as to see a human being, with arms and limbs
complete, and apparently a head, and assuredly a soul, yet into the
hands of which when you have put a brush and pallet, it cannot do
anything with them but imitate a piece of wood. It cannot color, it has
no ideas of color; it cannot draw, it has no ideas of form; it cannot
caricature, it has no ideas of humor. It is incapable of anything beyond
knots. All its achievement, the entire result of the daily application
of its imagination and immortality, is to be such a piece of texture as
the sun and dew are sucking up out of the muddy ground, and weaving
together, far more finely, in millions of millions of growing branches,
over every rood of waste woodland and shady hill.

Sec. XLVII. But what is to be done, the reader asks, with men who are
capable of nothing else than this? Nay, they may be capable of
everything else, for all we know, and what we are to do with them I will
try to say in the next chapter; but meanwhile one word more touching the
higher principles of action in this matter, from which we have descended
to those of expediency. I trust that some day the language of Types will
be more read and understood by us than it has been for centuries; and
when this language, a better one than either Greek or Latin, is again
recognized amongst us, we shall find, or remember, that as the other
visible elements of the universe--its air, its water, and its flame--set
forth, in their pure energies, the life-giving, purifying, and
sanctifying influences of the Deity upon His creatures, so the earth, in
its purity, sets forth His eternity and His TRUTH. I have dwelt above on
the historical language of stones; let us not forget this, which is
their theological language; and, as we would not wantonly pollute the
fresh waters when they issue forth in their clear glory from the rock,
nor stay the mountain winds into pestilential stagnancy, nor mock the
sunbeams with artificial and ineffective light; so let us not by our own
base and barren falsehoods, replace the crystalline strength and burning
color of the earth from which we were born, and to which we must return;
the