here and there sufficiently suggestive of
plain facts. I am quite unable to say how far I wasted,--how far I spent
to advantage,--the unaccountable hours during which I pored over these
wood-cuts; receiving more real sensation of sympathetic terror from the
drifting hair and fear-stricken face of Crusoe dashed against the rock,
in the rude attempt at the representation of his escape from the wreck,
than I can now from the highest art; though the rocks and water are
alike cut only with a few twisted or curved lines, and there is not the
slightest attempt at light and shade, or imitative resemblance. For one
thing, I am quite sure that being forced to make all I could out of very
little things, and to remain long contented with them, not only in great
part formed the power of close analysis in my mind, and the habit of
steady contemplation; but rendered the power of greater art over me,
when I first saw it, as intense as that of magic; so that it appealed to
me like a vision out of another world.

89. On the other hand this long contentment with inferior work, and the
consequent acute enjoyment of whatever was the least suggestive of truth
in a higher degree, rendered me long careless of the highest virtues of
execution, and retarded by many years the maturing and balancing of the
general power of judgment. And I am now, as I said, quite unable to
imagine what would have been the result upon me, of being enabled to
study, instead of these coarse vignettes, such lovely and expressive
work as that of Watson; suppose, for instance, the vignette at p. 87,
which would have been sure to have caught my fancy, because of the dog,
with its head on Crusoe's knee, looking up and trying to understand what
is the matter with his master. It remains to be seen, and can only be
known by experience, what will actually be the effect of these treasures
on the minds of children that possess them. The result must be in some
sort different from anything yet known; no such art was ever yet
attainable by the youth of any nation. Yet of this there can, as I have
just said, be no reasonable doubt;--that it is not well to make the
imagination indolent, or take its work out of its hands by supplying
continual pictures of what might be sufficiently conceived without
pictures.

90. Take, for instance, the preceding vignette, in the same book,
"Crusoe looking at the first shoots of barley." Nothing can be more
natural or successful as a representatio