Page:The Daughters of England.djvu/94

Rh It is a frequent complaint with travellers, that they find the scenery around them insipid; but this can never occur to the artist, through whatever country he may roam. A turn in the road, with a bunch of furze on one side, and a stunted oak on the other, is sufficient to arrest his attention, and occupy a page in his sketch-book. A willowy brook in the deep meadows, with cattle grazing on its banks, is the subject of another. The tattered mendicant is a picture, of himself; or the sturdy wagoner with his team, or the solitary orphan sitting in the porch of the village-church. Every group around the door of the inn, every party around the ancient elm in the centre of the hamlet, every beast of burden feeding by the way-side, has to him a beauty and a charm, which his art enables him to revive and perpetuate.

It is the same when he mingles in society. Hundreds and thousands of human beings may pass by the common observer without exciting a single thought or feeling, beyond their relative position with regard to himself. But the painter sees in almost every face a picture. He beholds a grace in almost every attitude, a scene of interest in every group; and, while his eye is caught by the classic beauty of an otherwise insignificant countenance, he arrests it in the position where light and shadow are most harmoniously blended; and, behold! it lives again beneath his touch—another, yet the same.

In every object, however familiar in itself, or unattractive in other points of view, the painter perceives at once what is striking, characteristic, harmonious, or graceful; and thus, while associating in the ordinary affairs of life, he feels himself the inhabitant of a world of beauty, from which others are shut out.

Would that we could dwell with more satisfaction upon this ideal existence, as it affects the morals of the artist's