And, after all--how much of
nature can you express? You confest yourself yesterday baffled by
all the magnificence around you.'
'Yes! to paint it worthily one would require to be a Turner, a Copley
Fielding, and a Creswick, all in one.'
'And did you ever remark how such scenes as this gorge of the
"Watersmeet" stir up a feeling of shame, almost of peevishness,
before the sense of a mysterious meaning which we ought to understand
and cannot?'
He smiled.
'Our torments do by length of time become our elements; and painful
as that sensation is to the earnest artist, he will feel it, I fancy,
at last sublime itself into an habitually gentle, reverent, almost
melancholy tone of mind, as of a man bearing the burden of an
infinite and wonderful message which his own frivolity and laziness
hinder him from speaking out.'
'Then it should beget in him, too, something of merciful indulgence
towards the seeming stupidity of those who see, after all, only a
very little shallower than he does into the unfathomable depths of
nature.'
'Well, sporting books and sportsmen seem to me, by their very object,
not to be worth troubling our heads about.
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