ccess depends on husbandry of resource. Do not
measure out to him his sunshine in inches of gesso; let him have the
power of striking it even out of darkness and the deep.

133. If human life were endless, or human spirit could fit its compass
to its will, it is possible a perfection might be reached which should
unite the majesty of invention with the meekness of love. We might
conceive that the thought, arrested by the readiest means, and at first
represented by the boldest symbols, might afterwards be set forth with
solemn and studied expression, and that the power might know no
weariness in clothing which had known no restraint in creating. But
dilation and contraction are for molluscs, not for men; we are not
ringed into flexibility like worms, nor gifted with opposite sight and
mutable color like chameleons. The mind which molds and summons cannot
at will transmute itself into that which clings and contemplates; nor is
it given to us at once to have the potter's power over the lump, the
fire's upon the clay, and the gilder's upon the porcelain. Even the
temper in which we behold these various displays of mind must be
different; and it admits of more than doubt whether, if the bold work of
rapid thought were afterwards in all its forms completed with
microscopic care, the result would be other than painful. In the shadow
at the foot of Tintoret's picture of the Temptation, lies a broken
rock-bowlder.[19] The dark ground has been first laid in, of color
nearly uniform; and over it a few, not more than fifteen or twenty,
strokes of the brush, loaded with a light gray, have quarried the solid
block of stone out of the vacancy. Probably ten minutes are the utmost
time which those strokes have occupied, though the rock is some four
feet square. It may safely be affirmed that no other method, however
laborious, could have reached the truth of form which results from the
very freedom with which the conception has been expressed; but it is a
truth of the simplest kind--the definition of a stone, rather than the
painting of one--and the lights are in some degree dead and cold--the
natural consequence of striking a mixed opaque pigment over a dark
ground. It would now be possible to treat this skeleton of a stone,
which could only have been knit together by Tintoret's rough temper,
with the care of a Fleming; to leave its fiercely-stricken lights
emanating from a golden ground, to gradate with the pen its ponderous
shadows,