The marvellous of size does not go into gilt
frames. You paint a Big Tree, and it only looks like a common tree in a
cramped coffin. To be sure, you can put a live figure against the butt
for comparison; but, unless you take a canvas of the size of Haydon's,
your picture is quite as likely to resemble Homunculus against an
average timber-tree as a large man against _Sequoia gigantea_. What our
artists did do was to get a capital transcript of the Big Trees'
color,--a beautifully bright cinnamon-brown, which gives peculiar gayety
to the forest, "making sunshine in the shady place"; also, their typical
figure, which is a very lofty, straight, and branchless trunk, crowned
almost at the summit by a mass of colossal gnarled boughs, slender plumy
fronds, delicate thin leaves, and smooth cones scarce larger than a
plover's egg. Perhaps the best idea of their figure may be obtained by
fancying an Italian stone-pine grown out of recollection.
Between all the ridges we had hitherto crossed, silvery streams leaped
down intensely cold through the granite chasms,--all of them fed from
the snow-peaks, and charmingly picturesque,--most of them good
trout-brooks, had we possessed time to try a throw; and now, on leaving
Clark's, we crossed the largest of these, a fork of the Merced which
flows through his valley.
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