Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/134

 things—as they are, or—as they have become. The picturesque belongs to the foreground always; or to the stage next beyond the foreground;—never does it take its range upon the horizon. The picturesque claims as its own the cherished and delicious ideas of deep seclusion, of lengthened, undisturbed continuance, and of the absence, afar-off, of those industrial energies which mark their presence by renovations, by removals, and by a better ordering of things, and by signs of busy industry, and of thriftiness and order.

Within the sacred precincts of the picturesque, the trees must be such as have outlived the winters of centuries, and been green through the scorching heats of unrecorded sultry summers: they stoop, and yet hold up knarled giant branches, leafy at the extreme sprays; and their twistings are such as to look supernatural, seen against an autumnal evening sky. The fences that skirt the homestead of the picturesque must have done their office through the occupancy of three or four generations. The dwellings of man must declare themselves to be such as have sheltered the hoary quietude of sires long ago gone to their graves. Inasmuch as the picturesque abjures change, it rejects improvement; it abhors the square, the perpendicular, the horizontal; and it likes rather all forms that now are other than at first they were, and that lean this way and that way, and that threaten to fall; but so did the same building threaten a fall a century ago! In a word,