the first. For a young man, this
was a position of some distinction, I think you will admit....

III

ROADS

(1873)

No amateur will deny that he can find more pleasure in a single drawing,
over which he can sit a whole quiet forenoon, and so gradually study
himself into humour with the artist, than he can ever extract from the
dazzle and accumulation of incongruous impressions that send him, weary
and stupefied, out of some famous picture-gallery. But what is thus
admitted with regard to art is not extended to the (so-called) natural
beauties: no amount of excess in sublime mountain outline or the graces
of cultivated lowland can do anything, it is supposed, to weaken or
degrade the palate. We are not at all sure, however, that moderation,
and a regimen tolerably austere, even in scenery, are not healthful and
strengthening to the taste; and that the best school for a lover of
nature is not to be found in one of those countries where there is no
stage effect--nothing salient or sudden,--but a quiet spirit of orderly
and harmonious beauty pervades all the details, so that we can
patiently attend to each of the little touches that strike in us, all of
them together, the subdued note of the landscape. It is in scenery such
as this that we find ourselves in the right temper to seek out small
sequestered loveliness. The constant recurrence of similar combinations
of colour and outline gradually forces upon us a sense of how the
harmony has been built up, and we become familiar with something of
nature's mannerism. This is the true pleasure of your "rural
voluptuary,"--not to remain awe-stricken before a Mount Chimborazo; not
to sit deafened over the big drum in the orchestra, but day by day to
teach himself some new beauty--to experience some new vague and tranquil
sensation that has before evaded him. It is not the people who "have
pined and hungered after nature many a year, in the great city pent," as
Coleridge said in the poem that made Charles Lamb so much ashamed of
himself; it is not those who make the greatest progress in this intimacy
with her, or who are most quick to see and have the greatest gusto to
enjoy. In this, as in everything else, it is minute knowledge and
long-continued loving industry that make the true dilettante. A man must
have thought much over scenery before he begins fully to enjoy it. It is
no youngling enthusiasm on hill-tops that can possess itself of the last
essence of beauty.