Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/123

Rh sure of one thing: poems, landscapes, pictures, and all other works of art (art human or superhuman) are never to be exhausted by one look, or by a hundred. If a man is good for anything, and the poem or the landscape is good for anything, he will find new meanings with new perusals. In other words, we may turn upon Emerson and say: "Yes, but then, you know, we never do see a picture—a picture that is a picture."

As was related a week ago, I spent the 12th of October on the North Shore. I brought back the remembrance of a glorious piece of the world's beauty. In outline, I had it in my mind. But I knew perfectly, both at the time and afterward, that I had not really made it my own. I had been too much taken up with other things. The eye does not see the landscape; nor does the mind see it. The eye is the lens, the mind is the plate. The landscape prints itself upon the mind, through the eye. But the mind must be sensitive and still, and—what is oftener forgotten—the exposure must be sufficiently prolonged. The clearest-eyed genius ever born never saw a landscape in ten minutes.