Essays, First Series | Page 7

one must have observed faces and forms which, without any
resembling feature, make a like impression on the beholder. A
particular picture or copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same train
of images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as some wild
mountain walk, although the resemblance is nowise obvious to the
senses, but is occult and out of the reach of the understanding. Nature is
an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the
old well-known air through innumerable variations.
Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works, and
delights in startling us with resemblances in the most unexpected
quarters. I have seen the head of an old sachem of the forest which at
once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of
the brow suggested the strata of the rock. There are men whose
manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful
sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon and the remains of the earliest
Greek art. And there are compositions of the same strain to be found in
the books of all ages. What is Guido's Rospigliosi Aurora but a
morning thought, as the horses in it are only a morning cloud? If any
one will but take pains to observe the variety of actions to which he is
equally inclined in certain moods of mind, and those to which he is
averse, he will see how deep is the chain of affinity.
A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort
becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form
merely,--but, by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter
enters into his nature and can then draw him at will in every attitude.
So Roos "entered into the inmost nature of a sheep." I knew a
draughtsman employed in a public survey who found that he could not
sketch the rocks until their geological structure was first explained to
him. In a certain state of thought is the common origin of very diverse
works. It is the spirit and not the fact that is identical. By a deeper
apprehension, and not primarily by a painful acquisition of many
manual skills, the artist attains the power of awakening other souls to a
given activity.
It has been said that "common souls pay with what they do, nobler

souls with that which they are." And why? Because a profound nature
awakens in us by its actions and words, by its very looks and manners,
the same power and beauty that a gallery of sculpture or of pictures
addresses.
Civil and natural history, the history of art and of literature, must be
explained from individual history, or must remain words. There is
nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us,--kingdom,
college, tree, horse, or iron shoe,--the roots of all things are in man.
Santa Croce and the Dome of St. Peter's are lame copies after a divine
model. Strasburg Cathedral is a material counterpart of the soul of
Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is
the ship-builder. In the man, could we lay him open, we should see the
reason for the last flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine and
tint in the sea-shell preexists in the secreting organs of the fish. The
whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners
shall pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility
could ever add.
The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some old
prediction to us and converting into things the words and signs which
we had heard and seen without heed. A lady with whom I was riding in
the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if
the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer
had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance
of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet. The man
who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has
been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world.
I remember one summer day in the fields my companion pointed out to
me a broad cloud, which might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to the
horizon, quite accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over
churches, --a round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate
with eyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide- stretched
symmetrical wings. What appears once in the atmosphere may appear
often,