Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/210

 *[Footnote: everywhere in fresh combinations; even in the icy north, herbs covering the earth, large alpine blossoms, and a serene azure sky, cheer a portion of the year. Hitherto landscape painting has pursued amongst us her pleasing task, familiar only with the simpler form of our native floras, but not, therefore, without depth of feeling, or without the treasures of creative imagination. Even in this narrower field, highly gifted painters, the Caracci, Gaspar Poussin, Claude Lorraine, and Ruysdael, have with magic power, by the selection of forms of trees and by effects of light, found scope wherein to call forth some of the most varied and beautiful productions of creative art. The fame of these master-works can never be impaired by those which I venture to hope for hereafter, and to which I could not but point, in order to recall the ancient but deeply-seated bond which unites natural knowledge with poetry and with artistic feeling; for we must ever distinguish in landscape painting, as in every other branch of art, between productions derived from direct observation, and those which spring from the depths of inward feeling and from the power of the idealising mind. The great and beautiful works which owe their origin to this creative power of the mind applied to landscape-painting, belong to the poetry of nature, and like man himself, and the imagination with which he is gifted, are not rivetted to the soil, or confined to any single region. I allude here more particularly to the gradation in the form of trees from Ruysdael and Everdingen, through Claude Lorraine to Poussin and Annibal Caracci. In the great masters of the art we perceive no trace of local limitation; but an enlargement of]*