MODERK PAINTERS.

VOLUME V.

p-RINTED BY R:\rTTH, ELDETl AND CO.,
LITTLE GUKEN ATIBOUU COURT, OLD BAILET, E.C.

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UNIVERSITEITSBIBLIOTHEEK UTRECHT
3576 1547

MODBEN PAINTERS.

VOLUME V.

COMPLETING THE WOBK, ATID CONTAINING

PARTS

VI. EeaflSmtg. —VII. ©f IScautB.
VIII. m of melation,

1. OF INVENTION FORMAL.

IX. <©{ of m?lattott.

2. OF INVENTION SPIRITUAL.

BY JOHN RUSKIN, M.A.,

AUTHOR OF "THE STONES OF VENICE," "SEVEN LA3VIPS OF ARCHITECTURE,''

ETC. ETC.

....." Accuse me not

Of arrogance,.....

If, having walked ^vitl^ Nature,
And offered, far as frailty would allow,
My heart a daily sacrifice to Tiaith,
I now affirm of Nature and of Truth,
Whom I have served, that their Divinity
Revolts, offended at the ways of men,
Philosophers, who, though the human soul
Be of a thousand faculties composed,
And twice ten thousand interests, do yet prize
This soul, and the transcendent universe,
No more than as a mirror that reflects
To proud Self-love her own intelligence."

WOKDSWORTII.

LONDON:
smitpi, elder and co., 65, cornhill.

1860.

[T/je Author reserves the Right of Translation.']

PREFACE.

The disproportion between the length of time occupied in
the preparation of this volume, and the slightness of
apparent result, is so vexatious to me, and must seem so
strange to the reader, that he will perhaps bear with my
stating some of the matters which have employed, or
interrupted me between 1855 and I860. I needed rest
after finishing the fourth volume, and did little in the
following summer. The winter of 1856 was spent in
writing the " Elements of Drawing," for which I thought
there was immediate need; and in examining with more
attention than they deserved some of the modern theories
of political economy, to which there was necessarily
reference in my addresses at Manchester. The Man-
chester Exhibition then gave me some work, chiefly in
its magnificent Reynolds' constellation; and thence I went
on into Scotland, to look at Dumblane and Jedburgh,
and some other favourite sites of Turner's; which I had
not all seen, when I received notice from Mr. Wornum
that he had obtained for me permission, from the Trustees
of the National Gallery, to arrange, as I thought best, the
Turner drawings belonging to the nation; on which I
returned to London immediately.

VI TEEEACE.

In seven tin boxes in the lower room of the National
Gallery I found upwards of nineteen thousand pieces of
paper, drawn upon by Turner in one way or another.
Many on both sides; some with four, five, or six
subjects on each side (the pencil point digging spiritedly
through from the foregrounds of the front into the
tender pieces of sky on the back) ; some in chalk,
which the touch of the finger would sweep away;'
others in ink, rotted into holes; others (some splendid
coloured drawings among them) long eaten away by
damp and mildew, and falling into dust at the edges,
in capes and bays of fragile decay; others worm-eaten,
some mouse-eaten, many torn half-way through; numbers
doubled (quadrupled, I should say,) up into four, being
Turner's favourite mode of packing for travelling; nearly
all rudely flattened out from the bundles in which Turner
had finally rolled them up and squeezed them into his
drawers in Queen Anne Street. Dust of thirty years
accumulation, black, dense, and sooty, lay in the rents of
the crushed and crumpled edges of these flattened bundles,
looking like a jagged black frame, and producing altogether
unexpected effects in brilliant portions of skies, whence
an accidental or experimental finger mark of the first
bundle-unfolder had swept it away.

About half, or rather more, of the entire number con-
sisted of pencil sketches, in flat oblong pocket-books,
dropping to pieces at the back, tearing laterally whenever
opened, and every drawing rubbing itself into the one
opposite. These first I paged with my own hand; then

' The best book of studies^ for his great ship-wTCcks contained about a quarter of a
pound of chalk debris, black and -white, broken off the crayons with which Tiuner had
di-awn furiously on both sides of the leaves; every leaf, with peculiar foresight, and
consideration of difficulties to be met by future mounters, containing half of one subject
on the front of it, and half of another on the back.

TEEFACE. vii

unbound; and laid every leaf separately in a clean sheet of
perfectly smooth writing paper, so that it might receive
no farther injury. Then, enclosing the contents and
boards of each book (usually ninety-two leaves, more or
less drawn on both sides, with two sketches on the boards
at the beginning and end,) in a separate sealed packet,
I returned it to its tin box. The loose sketches needed
more trouble. The dust had first to be got off them;
(from the chalk ones it could only be blown off;) then
they had to be variously flattened ; the torn ones to be laid
down, the loveliest guarded, so as to prevent all future
friction; and four hundred of the most characteristic
framed and glazed, and cabinets constructed for them
which would admit of their free use by the public. With
two assistants, I was at work all the autumn and winter
of 1857, every day, all day long, and often far into the
night.

The manual labour would not have hurt me ; but the
excitement involved in seeing unfolded the whole career of
Turner's mind during his life, joined with much sorrow at
the state in which nearly all his most precious work had
been left, and with great anxiety, and heavy sense of
responsibility besides, were very trying ; and I have never
in my life felt so much exhausted as when I locked the
last box, and gave the keys to Mr. Wornum, in May, 1858.
Among the later coloured sketches, there was one magni-
ficent series, which appeared to be of some towns along
the course of the Khine on the north of Switzerland.
Knowing that these towns were peculiarly liable to be
injured by modern railroad works, I thought I might rest
myself by hunting down these Turner subjects, and
sketching what I could of them, in order to illustrate his
compositions.

^(PPfBiPPPppiiipiPIPigjpga^^

viii PREFACE.

As I expected, the subjects in question were all on, or
near, that east and west reach of the lihine between Con-
stance and Basle. Most of them are of Rheinfelden,
Seckingen, Lauffenbourg, Schaffhausen, and the Swiss
Baden.

Having made what notes were possible to me of these
subjects in the summer (one or two are used in this
volume), I was crossing Lombardy in order to examine
some points of the shepherd character in the Yaudois
valleys, thinking to get my book finished next spring;
when I unexpectedly found some good Paul Yeroneses at
Turin. There were several questions respecting the real
motives of Yenetian work that still troubled me not a little,
and which I had intended to work out in the Louvre; but
seeing that Turin was a good place wherein to keep out
of people's way, I settled there instead, and began with
Yeronese's Queen of Sheba;—when, with much con-
sternation, but more delight, I found that I had never got
to the roots of the moral power of the Yenetians, and that
they needed still another and a very stern course of study.
There was nothing for it but to give up the book for that
year. The winter was spent mainly in trying to get at
the mind of Titian; not a light winter s task; of which
the issue, being in many ways very unexpected to me (the
reader will find "it partly told towards the close of this
volume), necessitated my going in the spring to Berlin, to
see Titian's portrait of Lavinia there, and to Dresden to
see the Tribute Money, the elder Lavinia, and girl in
white, with the flag fan. Another portrait, at Dresden,
of a lady in a dress )of rose and gold, by me unheard of
before, and one of an admiral, at Munich, had like to
have kept me in Germany all summer.

Getting home at last, and having put myself to

PREPACE. ix

w

arrange materials of which it was not easy, after so much
interruption, to recover the command;—which also were
now not reducible to a single volume — two questions
occurred in the outset, one in the section on vegetation,
respecting the origin of wood; the other in the section on
sea, respecting curves of waves ; to neither of which, from
botanists or mathematicains, any sufficient answer seemed
obtainable.

In other I'espects also the section on the sea was wholly
unsatisfactory to me: I knew little of ships, nothing of
blue open water. Turner's pathetic interest in the sea,
and his inexhaustible knowledge of shipping, deserved
more complete and accurate illustration than was at all
possible to me ; and the mathematical difficulty lay at
the beginning of all demonstration of facts. I determined
to do this piece of work well, or not at all, and threw the
proposed section out of this volume. If I ever am able to
do what I want with it (and this is barely probable), it
will be a separate book; which, on other accounts, I do not
regret, since many persons might be interested in studies
of the shipping of the old Nelson times, and of the sea-
waves and sailor character of all times, who would not
care to encumber themselves with five volumes of a work
on Art.

The vegetation question had, however, at all cost, to
be made out as best might be; and again lost me much
time. Many of the results of this inquiry, also, can only
be given, if ever, in a detached form.

During these various discouragements, the preparation
of the Plates could not go on prosperously. Drawing is
difficult enough, undertaken in quietness: it is impossible
to bring it to any point of fine rightness with half-applied
energy.

X riiEFACE.

Many experiments were made in hope of expressing
Turner's peculiar execution and touch by facsimile. They
cost time, and strength, and, for the present, have failed;
many elaborate drawings, made during the winter of 1858,
having been at last thrown aside. Some good may
afterwards come of these; but certainly not by reduction
to the size of the page of this book, for which, even of
smaller subjects, I have not prepared the most interesting,
for I do not wish the possession of any effective and
valuable engravings from Turner to be contingent on the
purchasing a book of mine.^

Feebly and faultfully, therefore, yet as well as I can
do it under these discouragements, the book is at last
done; respecting the general course of which, it will be
kind and well if the reader will note these few points that
follow.

The first volume was the expansion of a reply to
a magazine article ; and was not begun because I then
thought myself qualified to write a systematic treatise on
Art; but because I at least knew, and knew it to be
demonstrable, that Turner was right and true, and that
his critics were wrong, false, and base. At that time I
had seen much of nature, and had been several times
in Italy, wintering once in Rome; but had chiefly de-
lighted in northern art, beginning, when a mere boy, with

' To Mr. Armytage, Mr. Cuff, and Mr. Cousen, I have to express my sincere
thanks for the patience, and my sincere admiration of the skill, with which they have
helped me. Their patience, especially, has been put to seA'ere trial by the reward-
less toil required to produce facsimiles of drawings in which the slightness of subject
could never attmct any due notice to the excellence of workmanship.

Aid, just as disinterested, and deserving of as earnest acknowledgment, has been
given me by Miss Byfield, in lier faultless facsimiles of my careless sketches; by Miss
O. HiU, who prepared the copies which I required from portions of the pictures of the
old masters; and by Mr. Eobin Allen, in accurate line studies from nature, of which,
though only one is engraved in this Yolume, many others have been most seniceable,
both to it and to me.

PREFACE. xi

Eubens and Eembrandt. It was long before I got quit of
a boy's veneration for Rubens' physical art-power; and the
reader will, perhaps, on this ground forgive the strong
expressions of admiration for Rubens, which, to my great
regret, occur in the first volume.

Finding myself, however, engaged seriously in the essay,
I v/ent, before writing the second volume, to study in Italy;
where the strong reaction from the influence of Rubens
threw me at first too far under that of Angelico and
Raphael; and, which was the worst harm that came of
that Rubens influence, blinded me long to the deepest
qualities of Yenetian art; which, the reader may see by
expressions occurring not only in the second, but even in
the third and fourth volumes, I thought, however powerful,
yet partly luxurious and sensual, until I was led into the
final inquiries above related.

These oscillations of temper, and progressions of dis-
covery, extending over a period of seventeen years, ought
not to diminish the reader's confidence in the book. Let
him be assured of this, that unless important changes are
occurring in his opinions continually, all his life long, not
one of those opinions can be on any questionable subject
true. All true opinions are living, and show their life by
being capable of nourishment; therefore of change. But
their change is that of a tree—not of a cloud.

In the main aim and principle of the book, there is no
variation, from its first syllable to its last. ' It declares the
perfectness and eternal beauty of the work of God; and
tests all work of man by concurrence with, or subjection
to that, jlnd it differs from most books, and has a
chance of being in some respects better for the difference,
in that it has not been written either for fame, or for
money, or for conscience-sake, but of necessity.

xii PEEFACE.

It has not been written for praise. Had I wished to
gain present reputation, by a little flattery adroitly used
in some places, a sharp word or two withheld in others,
and the substitution of verbiage generally for investigation,
I could have made the circulation of these volumes tenfold
what it has been in modern society. Had I wished for
future fame, I should have written one volume, not five.
Also, it has not been written for money. In this wealth-
producing country, seventeen years' labour could hardly
have been invested with less chance of equivalent return.

Also, it has not been written for conscience-sake. I
had no definite hope in writing it; still less any sense of
its being required of me as a duty. It seems to me, and
seemed always, probable, that I might have done much
more good in some other way. But it has been written of
necessity. I saw an injustice done, and tried to remedy
it. I heard falsehood taught, and w^as compelled to deny
it. Nothing else was possible to me. I knew not how
little or how much might come of the business, or whether
I was fit for it; but here was the lie full set in front of
me, and there was no way round it, but only over it. So
that, as the work changed like a tree, it was also rooted
like a tree—not where it would, but where need was; on
which, if any fruit grow such as you can like, you are
welcome to gather it without thanks; and so far as it is
poor or bitter, it will be your justice to refuse it without
reviling.

imi

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PAET TI.

ON LEAF BEAUTY.

Pkeface .

CHAPTER

I.—The Earth-Veil
IL—The Leaf Orders
III.—The Bud .
The Leaf
Leaf Aspects .
The Branch
•The Stem

-The Leaf Monuments
-The Leaf Shadows
-Leaves Motionless

PAET YIL

OF CLOUD BEAUTY.

--»c>»-

CHAPTER

I.—The Cloud-Balancings.......105

II.—The Cloud-Flocks.......112

III.—The Cloud-Chai-iots...... .126

IV.—The Angel of the Sea.......137

"«itTrf rt'Tii^

i

CONTENTS.

PART VIIL

OF IDEAS OF RELATION:—I. OF INVENTION FORMAL.

chapter

I."-The Law of Help
IL—The Task of the Least
IIL-"The Rule of the Greatest
IV.—The Law of Perfectness

PART IX.

OF IDEAS OF RELATION:—IL OF INVENTION SPIRITUAL.

chapter

I.—The Dark Mirror .
XL—The Lance of Pallas.
-The Wings of the Lion
-Durer and Salvator .
-Claude and Poussin .

-Ruhens and Cuyp .
-Of Vulgarity .
-Woiivermans and Angelico
-The Two Boyhoods .
-The Nereid's Guard .
-The Hesperid iEgle.
-Peace

Local Index ....
Index to Painters and Pictuees
Topical Index

XV

LIST OF ENGEATINGS ON STEEL.

lisil,

XVI

SEPAEATE ENaRAYINGS ON WOOD.

EEIIATA.

p. 13, line 9 from bottom, omit the wds, "Tig. 1."

p, 123, line J 8 „ for " opposite," read " facing p. 343."

» ... a -^'.w, . . —

issr

MODEKN PAINTERS.

PAST TL

or LEAF BEAUTY.

CHAPTER I.

THE EARTH-VEIL.

§ 1. "To dress it and to keep it."

That, then, was to be our work. Alas! what work have we
set ourselves upon instead! How have we ravaged the garden
instead of kept it—feeding our war-horses with its flowers, and
splintering its trees into spear-shafts I

" And at the East a flaming sword."

Is its flame quenchless ? and are those gates that keep the way
indeed passable no more? or is it not rather that we no more
desire to enter? For what can we conceive of that first Eden
which we might not yet win back, if we chose. It was a
place full of flowers, we say. Well: the flowers are always
striving to grow wherever we suffer them; and the fairer, the
closer. There may indeed have been a Fall of Flowers, as a Fall
of Man; but assuredly creatures such as we are can now fancy
nothing lovelier than roses and lilies, which would grow for us
. side by side, leaf overlapping leaf, till the Earth was white and
red with them, if we cared to have it so. And Paradise was full
of pleasant shades and fruitful avenues. Well: what hinders us

vol. v. b

THE EAETH-VEIL.

TAKT Al.

from covering as miicli of the world as we like with pleasant
shade and pure blossom, and goodly fruit ? Who forbids its valleys
to be covered over with corn, till they laugh and sing? Who
prevents its dark forests, ghostly and uninhabitable, from being
changed into infinite orchards, wreathing the hills with frail-
floretted snoAV, far away to the half-lighted horizon of April,
and flushing the face of all the autumnal earth with glow of
clustered food? But Paradise was a place of peace, we say,
and all the animals were gentle servants to us. Well: the world
would yet be a place of peace if we were all peacemakers, and gentle
service should we have of its creatures if we gave them gentle
mastery. But so long as we make sport of slaying bird and
beast, so long as we choose to contend rather with our fellows
than with our faults, and make battlefield of our meadows instead
of pasture—so long, truly, the Flaming Sword will still turn every
way, and the gates of Eden remain barred close enough, till we
have sheathed the sharper flame of our own passions, and broken
down the closer gates of our own hearts.

§ 2. I have been led to see and feel this more and more, as I
considered the service which the flowers and trees, which man
was at ^first appointed to keep, were intended to render to him
in return for his care; and the services they still render to him,
as far as |he allows their influence, or fulfils his oAvn task towards
them. For what infinite wonderfulness there is in this vegetation,
considered, as indeed it is, the means by which the earth becomes
the companion of man—^his friend and his teacher! In the con-
ditions which we have traced in its rocks, there could only be
seen preparation for his existence;—the characters which enable
him to live on it safely, and to work with it easily—in all these
it has been inanimate and passive; but vegetation is to it as
an imperfect soul, given to meet the soul of man. The earth
in its depths must remain dead and cold, incapable except of
slow crystalline change; but at its surface, which human beings
look upon and deal with, it ministers to them tlirough a veil of
strange intermediate being; which breathes, but has no voice;
moves, but cannot leave its appointed place; passes through life
without consciousness, to death without bitterness; wears the beauty

of youth, without its passion; and declines to the weakness of age,
without its regret.

§ 3. And in this mystery of intermediate being, entirely subordinate
to us, with which we can deal as we choose, having just the greater
power as we have the less responsibility for our treatment of the
unsufFering creatOTe, most of the pleasures which we need from
the external world are gathered, and most of the lessons we need
are written, all kinds of precious grace and teaching being
united in this link between the Earth and Man: wonderful in
universal adaptation to his need, desire, and discipline; God's daily
preparation of the earth for him, with beautiful means of life.
First, a carpet to make it soft for him; then, a coloured fantasy
of embroidery thereon; then, tall spreading of foliage to shade
him from sun-heat, and shade also the fallen rain, that it may
not dry quickly back into the clouds, but stay to nomisli the
springs among the moss. Stout wood to bear this leafage:
easily to be cut, yet tough and light, to make houses for him,
or instruments (lance-shaft, or plough-handle, according to his
temper); useless it had been, if harder; useless, if less fibrous;
useless, if less elastic. Winter comes, and the shade of leafage
falls away, to let the sun warm the earth; the strong boughs
remain, breaking the strength of winter winds. The seeds which
are to prolong the race, innumerable according to the need, are
made beautiful and palatable, varied into infinitude of appeal
to the fancy of man, or provision for his service: cold juice, or
glowing spice, or balm, or incense, softening oil, preserving resin,
medicine of styptic, febrifuge, or lulling charm: and all these
presented in forms of endless change. Fragility or force, softness
and strength, in all degrees and aspects; unerring uprightness, as of
temple pillars, or undivided wandering of feeble tendrils on the
ground; mighty resistances of rigid arm and limb to the storms of
ages, or wavings to and fro with faintest pulse of summer streamlet.
Roots cleaving the strength of rock, or binding the transience
of the sand; crests basking in sunshine of the desert, or hiding
by dripping spring and lightless cave ; foliage far tossing in
entangled fields beneath every wave of ocean—clothing with
variegated, everlasting films, the peaks of the trackless mountains,

b 2

THE EARTH-VEIL.

or ministering at cottage doors to every gentlest passion and
simplest joy of humanity.

§ 4. Being thus prepared for us in all ways, and made beautiful,
and good for food, and for building, and for instruments of our
hands, this race of plants, deserving boundless affection and
admiration from us, become, in proportion to their obtaining it, a
nearly perfect test of our being in right temper of mind and way
of life; so that no one can be far wrong in either who loves the
trees enough, and every one is assuredly wrong in both, who does
not love them, if his life has brought them in his way. It is
clearly possible to do without them, for the great companionship
of the sea and sky are all that sailors need; and many a noble
heart has been taught the best it had to learn between dark stone
walls. Still if human life be cast among trees at all, the love borne
to them is a sure test of its purity. And it is a sorrowful proof
of the mistaken ways of the world that the "country," in the
simple sense of a place of fields and trees, has hitherto been
the source of reproach to its inhabitants, and that the words
" countryman, rustic, clown, paysan, villager," still signify a rude
and untaught person, as opposed to the words "townsman," and
" citizen." We accept this usage of words, or the evil which
it signifies, somewhat too quietly; as if it were quite necessary
and natural that country-people should be rude, and towns-
people gentle. Whereas I believe that the result of each mode
of life may, in some stages of the world's progress, be the
exact reverse; and that another use of words may be forced upon
us by a new aspect of facts, so that we may find ourselves saying:
" Such and such a person is very gentle and kind—he is quite
rustic; and such and such another person is very rude and ill-
taught—^lie is quite urbane."

§ 5. At all events, cities have hitherto gained the better part of
their good report through our evil ways of going on in the world
generally;—chiefly and eminently tln-ough our bad habit of fight-
ing with each other. No field, in the middle ages, being safe from
devastation, and every country lane yielding easier passage to the
marauders, peacefully-minded men necessarily congregated in
cities, and walled themselves in, malting as few cross-country roads

mm

I

CHAP. I. THE EARTII-VEIL. 5

as possible: while the men who sowed and reaped the harvests of
I Europe were only the servants or slaves of the barons. The disdain

= of all agricultural pursuits by the nobility, and of all plain facts by

I the monks, kept educated Europe in a state of mind over which

I natural phenomena could have no power; body and intellect being

i lost in the practice of war without purpose, and the meditation of

I words without meaning. Men learned the dexterity with sword

I and syllogism, which they mistook for education, within cloister and

I tilt-yard; and looked on all the broad space of the world of God

mainly as a place for exercise of horses, or for growth of food.
§ 6. There is a beautiful type of this neglect of the perfectness
of the Earth's beauty, by reason of the passions of men, in that
picture of Paul Uccello's of the battle of Sant' EgIdio,i in which
the armies meet on a country road beside a hedge of wild roses; the
'4 tender red flowers tossing above the helmets, and glowing between

I the lowered lances. For in like manner the whole of Nature

I only shone hitherto for man between the tossing of helmet-crests;

i and sometimes I cannot but think of the trees of the earth as

I capable of a kind of sorrow, in that imperfect life of theirs, as they

i opened their innocent leaves in the warm spring-time, in vain for

I men'; and all along the dells of England her beeches cast their

I dappled shade only where the outlaw drew his bow, and the

I king rode his careless chase; and by the sweet French rivers their

I long ranks of poplar waved in the twilight, only to show the flames

^ of burning cities, on the horizon, through the tracery of their

^ stems ; amidst the fair defiles of the Apennines, the twisted olive-

^ trunks hid the ambushes of treachery; and on their valley meadows,

day by day, the lilies which were white at the dawn were washed
I with crimson at sunset.

§ 7. And indeed I had once purposed, in this work, to show what
kind of evidence existed respecting the possible influence of country
life on men; it seeming to me, then, likely that here and there a
reader would perceive this to be a grave question, more than most
which we contend about, political or social, and might care to
follow it out with me earnestly.

' In our own National Galleiy. It is quaint and imperi'cct, but of great interest.

6 THE EARTH-VEIL. i-.mT vi.

The day will assuredly come ■when men will see that it is a
grave question; at which period, also, I doubt not, there will
arise persons able to investigate it. For the present, the move-
ments of the world seem little likely to be influenced by botanical
law; or by any other considerations respecting trees, than the
probable price of timber. I shall limit myself, therefore, to my
own simple woodman's work, and try to hew this book into its final
shape, with the limited and humble aim that I had in beginning
it, namely, to prove how far the idle and peaceable persons, who
have hitherto cared about leaves and clouds, have rightly seen, or
faithfully reported of them.

WJf.

CHAPTER 11.

THE LEAP ORDERS.

§ L As in our sketch of the structure of mountains it seemed advisable
to adopt a classification of their forms, which, though inconsistent
with absolute scientific precision, was convenient for order of
successive inquiry, and gave useful largeness of view; so, and
with yet stronger reason, in glancing at the first laws of vegetable
life, it will be best to follow an arrangement easily remembered
and broadly true, lioweA er incapable of being carried out into
entirely consistent detail. I say, " with yet stronger reason,"
because more questions are at issue among botanists than among
geologists ; a greater number of classifications have been suggested
for plants than for rocks; nor is it unlikely that those now accepted
may be here^after modified. I take an arrangement, therefore,
involving no theory; serviceable enough for all working purposes,
and sure to remain thus serviceable, in its rough generality, what-
ever views may hereafter be developed among botanists.

§ 2, A child's division of plants is into "> trees and flowers." If,
however, we were to take him in spring, after he had gathered his
lapful of daisies, from the lawn into the orchard, and ask him how
lie would call those wreaths of richer floret, whose frail petals tossed
their foam of promise between him and the sky, he would at once
see the need of some intermediate name, and call them, perhaps,
" tree-flowers." If, then, we took him to a birch-wood, and
showed him that catkins were flowers, as well as cherry-blossoms,
he might, with a little help, reach so far as to divide all flowers
into two classes: one, those that grew on ground; and another,
those that grew on trees. The botenist might smile at such a

division; but an artist would not. To liim, as to the child, there
is something specific and distinctive in those rough trunks that
carry the higher flowers. To him, it makes the main difference
between one plant and another, whether it is to tell as a light
upon the ground, or as a shade upon the sky. And if, after this,
we asked for a little help from the botanist, and he were to lead
us, leaving the blossoms, to look more carefully at leaves and buds,
we should find ourselves able in some sort to justify, even to him,
our childish classification. For our present purposes, justifiable or
not, it is the most suggestive and convenient. Plants are, indeed,
broadly referable to two great classes. The first we may, perhaps,
not inexpediently call tented plants. They live in encamp-
ments, on the ground, as lilies; or on surfaces of rock, or stems
of other plants, as lichens and mosses. They live—some for a
year, some for many years, some for myriads of years; but,
perishing, they pass as the tented Arab passes: they leave no
memorials of themselves, cxcept the seed, or bulb, or root which is to
perpetuate the race.

§ 3. The other great class of plants we may perhaps best call
building plants. These will not live on the ground, but eagerly
raise edifices above it. Each works hard with solemn fore-
- thought all its life. Perishing, it leaves its work in the form
which will be most useful to its successors—its own monument,
and their inheritance. These architectural edifices we call
" Trees."

It may be thought that this nomenclature already involves a
theory. But I care about neither the nomenclature, nor about
anything questionable in my description of the classes. The
reader is welcome to give them what names he likes, and to
render what account of them he thinks fittest. But to us, as
artists, or lovers of art, this is the first and most vital question
concerning a plant: " Has it a fixed form or a changing one ?
Shall I find it always as I do to-day—this Pamassia palustris—
with one leaf and one flower ? or may it some day have incalcu-
lable pomp of leaves and unmeasured treasure of flowers ? Will
it rise only to the height of a man—as an ear of com—and perish
like a man; or will it spread its boughs to the sea and branches

CHAV. II.

THE LEAE ORDERS.

to the river, and enlarge its circle of sliade in lieaven for a thou-
sand years ? "

§ 4. This, I repeat, is the Jirst question I ask the plant. And as
it answers, I range it on one side or the other, among those that
rest or those that toil: tent-dwellers, who toil not, neither do they
spin; or tree-builders, whose days are as the days of a people. I
find again, on farther questioning these plants who rest, that one
group of them does indeed rest always, contentedly, on the ground,
but that those of another group, more ambitious, emulate the
builders; and though they cannot build rightly, raise for them-
selves pillars out of the remains of past generations, on which
they themselves, living the life of St. Simeon Stylites, are called,
by courtesy. Trees; being, in fact, many of them (palms, for
instance) quite as stately as real trees.^

These two classes we might call earth-plants, and pillar-plants.

§ 5. Again, in questioning the true builders as to their modes of
work, I find that they also are divisible into two great classes.
Without in the least wishing the reader to accept the fanciful
nomenclature, I think he may yet most conveniently remember
these as "Builders with the shield," and "Builders with the
sword."

Builders with the shield have expanded leaves, more or less
resembling shields, partly in shape, but still more in office; for
under their lifted shadow the young bud of the next year is kept
from harm. These are the gentlest of the builders, and live in
pleasant places, providing food and shelter for man. Builders with
the sword, on the contrary, have sharp leaves in the shape of
swords, and the young buds, instead of being as numerous as the
leaves, crouching each under a leaf-shadow, are few in number,
and grow fearlessly, each in the midst of a sheaf of swords.
These builders live in savage places, are sternly dark in colour,
and though they give much help to man by their merely

' I am not sure that this is a fair account of palms. I have never had opportunity
of studying stems of Endogens, and I cannot understand the descriptions given of
them in books, nor do I know how far some of their branched conditions approximate
to real tree-structure. If this work, whatever eiTors it may involve, provokes the
curiosity of the reader so as to lead him to seek for more and better knowledge, it will
do all the service I hope from it.

physical strengtli, they (with few exceptions) give him no food,
and imperfect shelter. Their mode of building is ruder than
that of the shield-builders, and they in many ways resemble the
pillar-plants of the opposite order. We call them generally
« Pines."

§ 6. Our work, in this section, will lie only among the shield-
builders, sword-builders, and plants of rest. The Pillar-plants
belong, for the most part, to other climates. I could not analyze
them rightly; and the labour given to them would be comparatively
useless for our present purposes. The chief mystery of vege-
tation, so far as respects external form, is among the fair
shield-builders. These, at least, we must examine fondly and
earnestly.

iiiiwii

11

CHAPTER III.

THE BUD.

§ I. If you gather, in summer time, an outer spray of any shield-
leaved tree, you will find it consists of a slender rod, throwing
out leaves, perhaps on every side, perhaps on two sides only, with
usually a cluster of closer leaves at the end. In order to under-
stand its structure, we must reduce it to a simple general type.
Nay, even to a very inaccurate type. For a tree-branch is essen-
tially a complex thing, and no " simple " type can, therefore, be a
right one.

This type I am going to give you is full of fallacies and
inaccuracies; but out of these fallacies we will bring the truth,
by casting them aside one by one.

§ 2. Let the tree spray be represented under one of these two types,
A or B, Fig. 1, the cluster at the end
being in each case supposed to consist
of tlu:ee leaves only (a most impertinent
supposition, for it must at least have ^^
four, only the fourth would be in a
puzzling perspective in A, and hidden
behind the central leaf in b). So,
receive this false type patiently. When
leaves are set on the stalk one after
another, as in A, they are called
"alternate;" when placed as in B, opposite." It is necessary you
should remember this not very difficult piece of nomenclature.

If you examine the branch you have gathered, you will see
that for some little way below the full-leaf cluster at the end, the

12 THE BUD. PAKT VI.

stalk is smooth, and tlie leaves are set regularly on it. But at six,
eight, or ten inches down, there comes an awkward knot; some-
thing seems to have gone wrong, perhaps another spray branches
off there; at all events, the stem gets suddenly thicker, and you
may break it there (probably) easier than anywhere else.

That is the junction of two stories of the building. The
smooth piece has all been done this summer. At the knot the
Ibundation was left during the winter.

The year's work is called a " shoot." I shall be glad if you
will break it off to look at, as my A and b types are supposed to
go no farther down than the knot.

The alternate form A is more frequent than B, and some
botanists think includes B. We will, therefore, begin with it.

§ If you look close at the figure, you will see small projecting
points at the roots of the leaves. These represent buds, which
you may find, most probably, in the shoot you have in your hand.
Whether you find them or not, they are there—visible, or latent,
does not matter. Every leaf has assuredly an infant bud to take
care of, laid tenderly, as in a cradle, just where the leaf-stalk
forms a safe niche between it and the main stem. The child-bud
is thus fondly guarded all summer; but its protecting leaf dies
in the autumn; and then the boy-bud is put out to rough
winter-schooling, by w^hich he is prepared for personal entrance
into public life in the spring.

Let us suppose autumn to have come, and the leaves
to have fallen. Then our A of Tig. 1, the buds only
being left, one for each leaf, will appear as A B, in Fig. 2.
We will call the buds grouped at B, terminal buds, and
those at a, 6, and c, lateral buds.

This budded rod is the true year's work of the building
plant, at that part of its edifice. You may consider the
little spray, if you like, as one pinnacle of the tree-cathe-
dral, which has taken a year to fashion; innumera|^le other
pinnacles having been built at the same time on other branches.

§4. Now, every one of these buds, a, b, and c, as well as every
terminal bud, has the power and disposition to raise himself, in
the sprmg, into just such another pinnacle as A B is.

CHAP. III.

THE BUD.

This cleveloprnent is the process we; have mainly to study in
this chapter; but, in the outset, let us see clearly what it is to
end in.

Each bud, I said, has the power and disposition to make a
pinnacle of himself, but he has not always the opportunity. What
may hinder him we shall see presently. Meantime, the reader will,
perhaps, kindly allow me to assume that the buds a, Z>, and c, come
to notliing, and only the three terminal ones build forward. Each
of these producing the image of the first pinnacle, we have the type
for our next summer bough of
Fig. 3 ; in which observe the
original shoot a b, has become
thicker; its lateral buds having
proved abortive, are now only
'seen as little knobs on its sides.
Its terminal buds have each risen
into a new pinnacle. The cen-
tral or strongest one b c, has
become the very image of what
his parent shoot a b, was last year.
The two lateral ones are weaker
and shorter, one probably longer
than the other. The joint at b is
the knot or foundation for each
shoob above spoken of.

Knowing now what we are
about, we will go into closer detail.

Let us return to the type in Fig. 2, of the fully accomplished
summer's work: the rod with its bare buds. Fig. 1, Plate 51,
opposite, represents, of about half its real size, an outer spray of
oak in winter. It is not growing strongly, and is as simple as
possible in ramification. You may easily see, in each branch, the
continuous piece of shoot produced last year. The wrinkles which
make these shoots look like old branches are caused by drying, as ■
the stalk of a bunch of raisins is furrowed (the oak-shoot fresh
gathered is round as a grape-stalk). I draw them thus, because the
furrows are important clues to structure. Fig. 4 is the top of one

14 THE BUD. PART VI.

of these oak sprays magnified for reference. The
little brackets, y^ &c., which project beneath
each bud and sustain it, are the remains of the
leaf-stalks. Those stalks were jointed at that place,
and the leaves fell without leaving a scar, only
a crescent-shaped. Somewhat blank-looking flat
space, which you may study at your ease on a
horse-chestnut stem, where these spaces are very
large.

§ 6. Now if you cut your oak spray neatly
through, just above a bud, as at A, Fig. 4, and
look at it with a not very powerful mag-
nifier, you will find it present the pretty section.
Fig. 5.

That is the proper or normal section of an
oak spray. Never quite regular. Sure to have
one of the projections a little larger than the
rest, and to have its bark (the black line) not
quite regularly put round it, but exquisitely
finished, down to a little white star in the very
centre, which I have not drawn, because it
would look in the woodcut black, not white;
and be too conspicuous.

The oak spray, however, will not keep this form unchanged for
an instant. Cut it through a little way above your
first section, and you will find the largest projection
is increasing, till, just where it opens ^ at last into
the leaf-stalk, its section is Fig, 6. If, therefore,
you choose to consider every interval between bud
and bud as one story of your tower or pinnacle,
you find that there is literally not a hair's-breadth
of the work in which the plan of the tower does

' The added portion, siirromiding two of the sides of the pentagon, is the prepa-
J-ation for the stalk of the leaf, which, on detaching itself from the stem, presents
variable sections, of which those numbered 1 to 4, Fig. 7, are examples. I cannot
determine the proper normal form. The biilb-shaped spot in the heart of the upper-
most of the five projections In Fig. 6 is the root of the bud.

oS^_

1599

THE BUD.

Fig. 7.

not change. You may see in Plate 51 that every shoot is affected
by a subtle (in nature an infinitely subtle) change of contour
between bud and bud.

§ 7. But farther, observe in what succession those buds are put
round the bearing stem. Let the section of the stem be represented
by the small central circle in Fig. 8 ; and suppose
it surromided by a nearly regular pentagon (in
the figure it is quite regular for clearness' sake).
Let the first of any ascending series of buds be
represented by the curved projection filling the
nearest angle of the pentagon at 1. Then the
next bud, above, will fill the angle at 2 \ the
next above, at 3, the next at 4, the next at 5. The sixth will
come nearly over the first. That is to say, each projecting portion
of the section. Fig. 5, expands into its bud, not successively, but by
leaps, always to the 7text hut one; the buds being thus placed
in a nearly regular spiral order.

§8. I say nearly, regular—for there are subtleties of variation in
plan which it would l)e merely tiresome to enter into. All that
we need care about is the general law, of which the oak spray
furnishes a striking example,—that the buds of the first great
group of alternate builders rise in a spiral order round the stem
(I believe, for the most part, the spiral proceeds from right to left).
And this spiral succession very frequently approximates to the
pentagonal order, which it takes with great accuracy in an oak;
for, merely assuming that each ascending bud places itself as far as
it can easily out of the way of the one beneath, and yet not quite
on the opposite side of the stem, we find the interval between the
two must generally approximate to that left between 1 and 2, or
2 and 3, in Fig.

' For more accurate infommtion the reader may consult Professor Lindley's Intro^
ductioti to Botaiuj (Longman, 1848), vol. i. p. 245, et scqq.

16 THE BUD. PART VI.

§ 9. Should tlie interval be consistently a little less than that which
brings out the pentagonal structure, the plant
seems to. get at first into much difficulty. For,
in such case, there is a probability of the buds
falling into a triangle, as at A, Fig. 9 ; and then
the fourth must come over the first, which
would be inadmissible (we shall soon see why).
Nevertheless, the plant seems to like the trian-
gular result for its outline, and sets itself to get
out of the difficulty with much ingenuity, by
methods of succession, which I will examine far-
ther in the next chapter: it being enough for us
to know at present that the puzzled, but persevering, vegetable does
get out of its difficulty, and issues triumphantly, and with a pecu-
liar expression of leafy exultation, in a hexagonal star, composed of
two distinct triangles, normally as at b. Fig. 9. Why the buds do
not like to be one above the other, we shall see in next chapter.
Meantime I must shortly warn the reader of what we shall then
discover, that, though we have spoken of the projections of our
pentagonal tower as if they were first built to sustain each its leaf,
they are themselves chiefly built by the leaf they seem to sustain.
Without troubling ourselves about this yet, let us fix in our minds
broadly the effective aspect of the matter, which is all we want, by
a simple practical illustration.

§ 10. Take a piece of stick half-an-inch thick, and a yard or two
long, and tie large knots, at any equal distances you choose,
on a piece of pack-thread. Then wind the pack-thread round
the stick, with any number of equidistant turns you choose,
from one end to the other, and the knots will take the position
of buds in the general type of alternate vegetation. Byv varying
the number of knots and the turns of the thread, you may get
the system of any tree, with the exception of one character only
—viz., that since the shoot grows faster at one time than another,
the buds run closer together when the growth is slow. You cannot
imitate this structure by closing the coils of your string, for that
would alter the positions of your knots irregularly. The intervals
between the buds are, by this gradual acceleration or retardation

i t,!

the bud.

of growth, usually vai'ied in lovely proportions. Fig. 10 shows the
elevations of the buds on five different sprays of oak; a and b being
of the real size (short shoots); c, D, and E, on a reduced scale.

Fig. 10.

E

I have not traced the cause of the apparent tendency^of the buds
to follow in pairs, in these longer shoots.

vol. t. €

§ 11. Lastly: If tlie spiral be constructed so as to bring tlie buds
nearly on opposite sides of the stem, tliougli
alternate in succession, tlie stem, most probably,
will slioot a little away from each bud after
throwing it off, and thus establish the oscilla-
tory form h, Fig. 11, which, when the buds are
placed, as in this case, at diminishing intervals,
is very beautiful.^
§ 12. I fear this has been a tiresome chapter; but
it is necessary to master the elementary struc-
ture, if we are to understand anything of trees;
and the reader will therefore, perhaps, take
patience enough to look at one or two examples
of the spray structure of the second great class
of builders, in which the leaves are opposite.
Nearly all opposite-leaved trees grow, nor-
mally, like vegetable weathercocks run to
seed, with north and south, and east and west
pointers thrown off alternately one over an-
other, as in Fig. 12.

This, I say, is the normal condition. Under
certain circumstances, north and south pointers
set themselves north-east and south-west; this
concession being acknowledged and imitated by
the east and west pointers at the next oppor-
timity; but, for the present, let us keep to oxu'
simple form.

The first business of the budding stem,
is to get every pair of buds set accurately
at right angles to the one below. Here are some examples
of the way it contrives this. A, Fig. 13, is the section of the
stem of a spray of box, magnified eight or nine times, just

' Fig. 11 is n shoot of the Hnic, drawn on two sides, to show its continuous curve in
one direction, and altemaled curves in another. The buds, which may be seen to be at
equal heights in the two figttres, are exquisitely p ©portioned in their distances. There
is no end to the refinement of system, if we choose to pursue it.

THE BUI).

where it throws off two of its leaves, suppose on north and south
sides. The crescents below and above are sections through the leaf-
stalks thrown off on each side. Just above this joint, the section

Fig. 13.

of the stem is b, which is the normal section of a box-stem, as
rig. 5 is of an oak's. This, as it ascends, becomes c, elongating
itself now east and west; and the section next to c would be again
A turned that way; or, taking the succession completely through
two joints, and of the real size, it
would be thus: Fig. 14.

The stem of the spotted aucuba 0 S O ^^ E5 0 g
is normally hexagonal, as that of the C C

box is normally sq^uare. It is very dexterous and delicate in its mode
of transformation to the two sides. Through the joint it is A,

Jig .15. .

Fig. 15. Above joint, b, normal, passing on into c, and d for the
next joint.

While in the horse-chestnut, a larger tree, and, as we shall see
hereafter, therefore less regular in conduct, the section, normally

C 2

20

hexagonal, is much rounded
and softened into irregularities;
k, Fig. 16, becoming, as it buds,
B and c. The dark diamond
beside c is a section through a
bud, in which, however small,
the quatrefoil disposition is
always seen complete: the
four little infant leaves with
a queen leaf in the middle,
all laid in their fan-shaped
feebleness, safe in a white ^
cloud of miniature woollen
blanket.

The elementaiy structure of all important trees may, I think,
thus be resolved into three principal forms : three-leaved. Fig. 9;
four-leaved. Figs. 13 to 16; and five-leaved, Fig. 8. Or, in well-
known terms, trefoil, quatrefoil, cinqfoil. And these are essential
classes, more complicated forms being usually, it seems to me,
resolvable into these, but these not into each other. The simplest
arrangement (Fig. 11), in which the buds are nearly opposite in
position, though alternate in elevation, cannot, I believe, constitute
a separate class, being only an accidental condition of the spiral.
If it did, it might be called difoil; but the important classes are
three:—

Trefoil, Fig. 9: Type, Rhododendron,

Quatrefoil, Fig. 13 : Type, Horse-chestnut.

Type, Oak.

The coincidences between beautiful architecture and the con-
struction of trees must more and more have become marked in the

reader's mind as we advanced: and if he will now look at what I

1 '

have said in other places of the use and meaning of the trefoil,
quatrefoil, and cinqfoil, in Gothic architecture, he will see why I
could hardly help thinking and speaking of all trees as builders.
But there is yet one more subtlety in their way of building which
we have not noticed. If the reader will look carefully at the sepa-

I-

THE BUD.

rate slioots in Plate 51, lie will see that tlie furrows of tlie stems fell
in almost every case into continuous spiral curves, carrying the
whole system of buds with them. This superinduced spiral action,
of which we shall perhaps presently discover the cause, often
takes place vigorously, producing completely twisted stems of great
thickness. It is nearly always existent slightly, giving farther
grace and change to the m'hole wonderful structure. And thus avo
have, as the final result of one year's vegetative labour on any
single spray, a twisted tower, not similar at any height of its
building: or (for, as we shall see presently, it loses in diameter at
each bud) a twisted spire, correspondent somewhat in principle to
the twisted spire of Dijon, or twisted fountain of Ulm, or twisted
shafts of Verona. Bossed as it ascends with living sculpture,
chiselled, not by diminution but through increase, it rises by one
consistent impulse from its base to its minaret, ready, in spring-
time, to throw round it at the crest at once the radiance of fresh
youth and the promise of restoration after that youth has passed
away. A marvellous creation : nay, might we not almost say, a
marvellous creature, full of prescience in its infancy, foreboding
even, in the earliest gladness of its opening to sunshine, the hour of
fainting strength and falling leaf, and guarding under the shade of
its faithful shields the bud that is to bear its hope through winter's
shieldless sleep?

Men often look to bring about great results by violent and un-
prepared effort. But it is only in fair and forecast order, " as the
earth bringeth forth her bud," that righteousness and praise may
spring forth before the nations.

22

CHAPTER IV.

THE LEAP.

§ 1. Having now some clear idea of tlie position of tlie bud^ we have
next to examine tlie forms and structure of its shield—the leaf
which guards it. You will form the best general idea of the
flattened leaf of shield-builders by thinking of it as you would of
a mast and sail. More consistently with our classification, we
might perhaps say, by thinking always of the arm sustaining tlie
shield; but we should bo in danger of carrying fancy too far, and
the likeness of mast and sail is closer, for the mast tapers as the
leaf-rib does, while the hand holding the uppermost strap of the
buckler clenches itself. Whichever figure we use, it will cure us
of the bad habit of imagining a leaf composed of a short stalk
with a broad expansion at the end of it. Whereas we should
always think of the stalk as running right up the leaf to its
point, and carrying the expanded, or foliate part, as the mast
of a lugger does its sail. To some extent, indeed, it has yards
also, ribs branching from the innermost one; only the yards of
the leaf will not run up and down, which is one essential function
of a sailyard.

§ 2. The analogy will, however, serve one step more. As the sail
must be on one side of the mast, so the expansion of a leaf is on
one side of its central rib, or of its system of ribs. It is laid over
them as if it were stretched over a frame, so that on the upper
surface it is comparatively smooth; on the lower, barred. The
understanding of the broad relations of these parts is the principal
work we have to do in this chapter.

§ 3. First, then, you may roughly assume that the section of any

CIIAI'. IV. TIIJO LEAF. 23

- ^ ''v' •fs

leaf-mast will be a crescent, as at a, Fig. 17 (compare Fig. 7
above). Tlic flat side is tlie
uppermost, tlie round side under-
neath, and the flat or upper side
carries the leaf. You can at
once see the convenience of this
structure for fitting to a central
stem. Suppose the central stem
has a little hole in the centre, 6,
Fig. 17, and that you cut it down

through the middle (as terrible knights used to cut their enemies
in the dark ages, so that half tlie head fell on one side, and half
on the other) : Pull the two halves separate, c, and they will
nearly represent tlie shape and position of opposite leaf-ribs. In
reality the leaf-stalks have to fit themselves to the central stem, cT,
and as we shall see presently, to lap round it: but we must not go
too fast.

Now, a, Fig. 17, being the general type of a leaf-stalk, Fig. 18 is
the general type of the way it expands into and carries its leaf;^ this

I'ig. 18.

figure being the enlargement of a typical section right across any
leaf, the dotted lines show the under surface foreshortened. You
see I have made one side broader than the other. I mean that.
It is typically so. Nature cannot endure two sides of a leaf to be
alike. By encouraging one side more than the other, either by
giving it more air or light, or perhaps in a chief degree by the
mere fact of the moisture necessarily accumulating on the lower
edge when it rains, and the other always drying first, she con-

' I believe the imdeimost of the two divisions of the leaf represents vegetable tissue
returning from the extremity. See Lindley's Introduction to Botany (1848), vol. i.
p. 253.

24 THE LEAF. FAKT VI.

trives it so, that if the essential form or idea of the leaf be a,
rig. 19j the actual form will always be c, or an
approximation to it; one half being pushed in
advance of the other, as at h, and all reconciled
hj soft curvature, c. The effort of the leaf to
keep itself symmetrical rights it, however, often
at the point, so that the insertion of the stalk
only makes the inequality manifest. But it
follows that the sides of a straight section across the leaf are
unequal all the way up, as in my drawing, except at one point.

§ 5, I have represented the two wings of the leaf as slightly convex
on the upper surface. This is also on the whole a
typical character. I use the expression "wings of
the leaf," because supposing we exaggerate the
main rib a little, the section will generally re-
semble a bad painter's type of a bird (a, Fig. 20).
Sometimes the outer edges curl up, h, but an
entirely concave form, c, is rare. When h is strongly developed,
closing well in, the leaf gets a good deal the look of a boat
with a keel.

§ 6. If now you take this oblique form of sail, and cut it into
any number of required pieces down to its mast, as in Fig. 21, a,

ij

'i.
r

and then suppose each of the pieces to contract into studding-sails
at the side, you will have whatever type of divided leaf you choose

THE LEAF.

to sliape it for. In Fig. 21, A, b, I liave taken the rose as the
simplest type. The leaf is given in separate contour at C; but that
of the mountain ash, A, Fig. 22, suggests the original oval form
which encloses all the sub-
divisions much more beau-
tifully. Each of the stud-
ding-sails in tliis ash-leaf
looks much at first as if he
were himself a mainsail.
But you may know him
always to be a subordinate,
by observing that the in-
equality of the two sides,
which is brought about by
accidental influences in the
mainsail, is an organic law
in the studding-sail. The
real leaf tries to set itself
evenly on its mast; and the
inequality is only a graceful
concession to circumstances.
But the subordinate or stud-
ding-sail is always hy law
larger at one side than the
other; and if he is himself again divided into smaller sails, he will
have larger sails on the lowest side, or one more sail on the lowest
side, than he has on the other. He always wears, therefore, a ser-
vant's, or, at least, subordinate's dress. You may know him any-
where as not the master. Even in the ash leaflet, of which I have
outlined one separately, b. Fig. 22, this is clearly seen; but it is
much more distinct in more finely divided leaves.^
g Observe, then, that leaves are broadly divisible into mainsails
and studding-sails; but that the word leaf is properly to be used
only of the mainsail; leaflet is the best word for minor divisions;
and whether these minor members are onl}' separated by deep

' For farther notes on this subject, sec my Elements of Drawing, p. 286.

26 THE LEAF. FAKT VI.

cuts, or become complete stalked leaflets, still tliey are always
to be thought of merely as parts of a true leaf.

It follows from the mode of their construction that leaflets
must always lie more or less fiat, or edge to edge, in a continuous
plane. This position distinguishes them from true leaves as much
as their oblique form, and distingnishes them with the same deli-
cate likeness of system; for as the true leaf takes, accidentally and
partially, the obliqne outline whicli is legally required in the sub-
ordinate, so the true leaf takes accidentally and partially the flat
disposition which is legally required in the subordinate. And
this point of position we must now study. Henceforward, through-
out this chapter, the reader will please note that I speak only
of true leaves, not of leafiets.

LAW I. The Law of Deflection.—The first law, then,
respecting position in true leaves, is that they
fall gradually back from the uppermost one,
or uppermost group. They are never set as
at a, Fig. 23, but always as at h. The reader
may see at once that they have more room
and comfort by means of the latter arrange-
ment. The Liav is carried out with more or
less distinctness according to the habit of the
plant; but is always acknoAvledged.

Li strong-leaved shrubs or trees it is shown with great dis-
tinctness and beauty: the phillyrea shoot, for instance. Fig. 24, is

CHAP. ir.

almost ill as true symmetry as a Greek honeysuckle ornament.
In the hawthorn shoot, central in Plate 52, opposite, the law is seen
very slightly, yet it rules all the play and fantasy of the varied
leaves, gradually depressing their lines as they arc set lower. In
crowded foliage of large trees the disposition of each separate
leaf is not so manifest. For there is a strange coincidence
in this between trees and communities of men. When the com-
mmiity is small, people fall more easily into their places, and
take, each in his place, a firmer standing than can be obtained
by the individuals of a great nation. The members of a vast
community are separately weaker, as an aspen or elm leaf is
thin, tremulous, and directionless, compared with the spear-like
settino; and firm substance of a rhododendron or laurel leaf. The
laurel and rhododendron are like the Athenian or Florentine re-
publics; the aspen like England—strong-trunked enough when
put to proof, and very good for making cartwheels of, but
shaking pale with epidemic panic at every breeze. Nevertheless,
the aspen has the better of the great nation, in that if you
take it bough by bough, you shall find the gentle law of respect
and room for each other truly observed by the leaves in such,
broken way as they can manage it; but in the nation you find
every one scrambling for his neighbour's place.

This, then, is our first law, which we may generally call the
Law of Deflection; or, if the position of the leaves with respect
to the root be regarded, of Radiation. The second is more curious,
and we must go back over our ground a little to get at it.

LAW II. The Law oe Succession.—From what we saw of
the position of buds, it follows that in every tree the leaves at
the end of the spray, taking the direction given them by the
uppermost cycle or spiral of the buds, will fall naturally into a
starry group, expressive of the order of their growth. In an
oak we shall have a cluster of five leaves, in a horse-chestnut
of four, in a rhododendron of six, and so on. But observe, if
we draw the oak-leaves all equal, as at a, Fig. 25, or the
chestnut's (b), or the rhododendron's (c), you instantly will feel,
or ought to feel, that something is wrong; that those are not
foliage forms—not even normally or typically so—but dead forms,

like crystals of snow. Considering this, ajid looking back to last
chapter, you will see that the buds which throw out these leaves

a

do not grow side by side, but one above another. In the oak and
rhododendron, all five and all six buds are at different heights;
in the chestnut, one couple is above the other couple.

Now so surely as one bud is above another, it must be stronger
or weaker than that other. The shoot may either be increasing
in strength as it advances, or declining; in either case, the buds
must vary in power, and the leaves in size. At the top of the
shoot, the last or uppermost leaves are mostly the smallest;
of course always so in spring as they develope.

Let us then apply these conditions to our formal figure above,
and suppose each leaf to be weaker in its order of succession.
The oak becomes as a, Fig. 26, the chestnut shoot as b, the rhodo-

dendron, c. These, I should think, it can hardly be necessary
to tell the reader, are true normal forms;—respecting which one
or two points must be noticed in detail.

The magnitude of the leaves in the oak star diminishes, of course,
in alternate order.^ The largest leaf is the lowest, 1 in Figure 8,
p. 15. While the lai'gest leaf forms the bottom, next it, opposite

CHAP. IV. THE LEAF.

eacli other, come the third and fourth, in order and magnitude,
and the fifth and second form the top. An oak star is, there-
fore, always an oblique star; but in the chestnut and other
quatrefoil trees, though the uppermost couple of leaves must
always be smaller than the lowermost couple, there appears no
geometrical reason why the opposite leaves of each couple should
vary in size. Nevertheless, they always do, so that the quatrefoil
becomes oblique as well as the cinqfoil, as you see it is in Fig. 26.

Fig. 27.

The normal of four-foils is therefore as in Fig. 27, A, (maple),
with magnitudes, in order numbered; but it often happens that an
opposite pair agree to become largest and smallest; thus giving the

30 THE LEAF. FAKT VI.

pretty symmetry, Fig. 27, b (spotted ancuba). Of course the
quatrefoil in reality is always less formal, one pair of leaves more
or less hiding or preceding the other. Fig. 28 is the outline of a
young one in the maple.

§ 12. The third form is more complex, and we must take the pains to
follow out what we left unobserved in last chapter respecting the
way a triplicate plant gets out of its difficulties.

• Draw a circle as in Fig. 29, and two lines, A B, B c, touching itj
equal to each other, and each divided
accurately in half where they touch the
circle, so that a p shall be equal
to p b, b q, and q c. And let the
lines a b and b c be so placed that a
dotted line a c, joining their extremi-
ties, would not be much longer than
either of them.

Continue to draw lines of the same
length all round the circlc. Lay
five of them, AB, BO, cd, de, ef.
Then join the points ad, e b, and cF,
and you have Fig. 30, which is a hexa-
gon, with the following curious pro-
perties. It has one side largest, c d,
two sides less, but equal to each other,
a e and B e ; and three sides less
still, and equal to each other, a d, c F,
and b e.

Now put leaves into this hexagon.
Fig. 31, and you will see how charm-
ingly the rhododendron has got out
of its difficulties. The next cycle
will put a leaf in at the gap at
the top, and begin a new hexagon.
Observe, however, this geometrical
figure is only to the rhododendron
what the a in Fig. 25 is to the oak,
the icy or dead form. To get the

I- e,

nimumtisSM

CHAP. IV. THE LEAF.

31

living normal form we must introduce
our law of succession. That is to say,
the five lines A B, b c, &c., must continually
diminish, as they proceed, and therefore
continually approach the centre; roughly,
as in Fig. 32.

§ I dread entering into the finer properties of this construction,

but the reader cannot now fail to
feel their beautiful result either in
the cluster in Fig. 26, or here in
Fig. 33, which is a richer and more
oblique one. The three leaves of
the uppermost triad are perfectly
seen, closing over the bud; and the
general form is clear, though the
lower triads are confused to the
eye by unequal development, as
in these complex arrai^gements is
almost always the case. The more
difficulties are to be encountered
the more licence is given to the

plant in dealing with them, and we shall hardly ever find a rho-
dodendron shoot fulfilling its splendid spiral as an oak does its
simple one.

Here, for instance, is the actual order of ascending leaves in
four rhododendron shoots which I gather at random.

Tig. 34.

Of these, A is the only quite well-conducted one; B takes one
short step, c, one step backwards, and D, two steps back, and one,
too short, forward.

«

THE LEAf.

§ 14. LAW III. The Law op Resilience.—If you have teen
gathering any brandies from tlie trees I have named among
quatrefoils (the box is the best for exemplification), you have
perhaps been embarrassed by finding that the leaves, instead of
growing on four sides of the stem, did practically grow oppositely
on two. But if you look closely at the places of their insertion,
you will find they indeed spring on all fom* sides; and that
in order to take the flattened opposite position, each leaf twists
round on its stalk, as in Fig. 35,
which represents a box-leaf magni-
fied and foreshortened. The leaves
do this in order to avoid growing
downwards, where the position of
the bough and bud would, if the
leaves regularly kept their places, ^'S- 35.

involve downward growth. The leaves always rise up on each side
from beneath, and form a flattened group, more or less distinctly
in proportion to the horizontality of the bough, and the contiguity
of foliage beloAV and above. I shall not trouble myself to illustrate
this law, as you have only to gather a few tree-sprays to see its
effect. But you must note the resulting characters on every leaf;
namely, that not one leaf in a thousand grows without a fixed turn
in its stalk; warping and varying the whole of the curve on the
two edges, throughout its length, and thus producing the loveliest
-conditions of its form. We shall presently trace the law of resi-
lience farther on a larger scale: meanwhile, in summing the
results of our inquiry thus far, let us remember that every one of
these laws is observed with varying accuracy and gentle equity,
according not only to the strength and fellowship of foliage on the
spray itself, but according to the place and circumstances of its
growth.

§ 15. For the leaves, as we shall see immediately, are the feeders of
the plant. Their own orderly habits of succession must not interfere
with their main business of finding food. Where the sun and air
are, the leaf must go, whether it be out of order or not. So, therefore,
in any group, the first consideration with the young leaves is much
like that of young bees, how to keep out of each other's way, that

11

CHAP. IV.

• THE LEAF.

every one may at once leave its neighbours as much free-air
pasture as possible, and obtain a relative freedom for itself. This
would be a quite simple matter, and produce other simply balanced
forms, if each branch, with open air all round it, had nothing to
think of but reconcilement of interests among its own leaves. But
every branch has others to meet or to cross, sharing with them,
in various advantage, what shade, or sun, or rain is to bo had.
Hence every single leaf-cluster presents the general aspect of a
little family, entirely at unity among themselves, but obliged to
get their living by various shifts, concessions, and infringements of
the family rules, in order not to invade the privileges of other
people in their neighbourhood.

§ 16. And in the arrangement, of these concessions there is an
exquisite sensibility among the leaves. They do not grow each
to his own liking, till they run against one another, and then
turn back sulkily; but by a watchful instinct, far apart, they
anticipate their companions' courses, as ships at sea, and in
every new unfolding of their edged tissue, guide themselves
by the sense of each other's remote presence, and by a watchful
penetration of leafy purpose in the far future. So that every
shadow which one casts on the next, and every glint of sun which
each reflects to the next, and every touch which in toss of storm
each receives from the next, aid or arrest the development of
their advancing form, and direct, as will be safest and best, the
curve of every fold and the current of every vein.

§ 17. And this peculiar character exists in all the structures thus
developed, that they are always visibly the result of a volition on
the part of the leaf, meeting an external force or fate, to which it
is never passively subjected. Upon it, as on a mineral in the
course of formation, the great merciless influences of the universe,
and the oppressive powers of minor things immediately near it, act
continually. Heat and cold, gravity and the other attractions, windy
pressure, or local and unhealthy restraint, must, in certain inevitable
degrees, affect the whole of its life. But it is life which they affect;
—a life of progress and will,—not a merely passive accumulation
of substance. This may be seen by a single glance. The mineral,—
suppose an agate in the course of formation—shows in every line
VOL. V. »

34 THE LEAF. FAKT VI.

nothing but a dead submission to surrounding force. Flowing, or
congealing, its substance is here repelled, there attracted, unre-
sistingly to its place, and its languid sinuosities follow the clefts of
the rock that contains them, in servile deflexion and compulsory
cohesion, impotently calculable, and cold. But the leaf, full of fears
and affections, shiinks and seeks, as it obeys. Not thrust, but awed
into its retiring; not dragged, but won to its advance; not bent
aside, as by a bridle, into new courses of growth: but persuaded
and converted through tender continuance of voluntary change.

§ 18. The mineral and it differing thus widely in separate being,
they differ no less in modes of companionship. The mineral
crystals group themselves neither in succession, nor in sympathy;
but great and small recklessly strive for place, and deface or distort
each other as they gather into opponent asperities. The confused
crowd fills the rock cavity, hanging together in a glittering, yet
sordid heap, in which nearly every crystal, owing to their vain
contention, is imperfect, or impure. Here and there one, at the cost
and in defiance of the rest, rises into unwarped shape or unstained
clearness. But the order of the leaves is one of soft and subdued
concession. Patiently each awaits its appointed time, accepts its
prepared place, yields its required observance. Under every
oppression of external accident, the group yet follows a laiv laid
down in its own heart; and all the members of it, whether in
sickness or health, in strength or languor, combine to carry out
this first and last heart laAV; receiving, and seeming to desire for
themselves and for each other, only life which they may communi-
cate, and loveliness which they may reflect.

Mil

35

CHAPTER V.

LEAF ASPECTS,

§ 1- Befoee following farther our inquiry into tree structure, it will
rest us, and perhaps forward our work a little, to make some use of
what we know already.

It results generally from what we have seen that any group of
four or five leaves presenting itself in its natural position to the eye,
consists of a series of forms connected by exquisite and complex
symmetries, and that these forms will he not only varied in thera-
Belves, but every one of them seen under a different condition of
foreshortening.

The facility of drawing the group may be judged of by a
comparison. Suppose five or six boats, very beautifully built,
and sharp in the prow, to start all from one point, and the first
bearing up into the wind, the other three or four to, fall off from it in
succession an equal number of points,^ taking each, in consequence,
a different slope of deck from the stem of the sail. Suppose, also,
that the bows of these boats were transparent, so that you could
see the under sides of their decks as well as the upper;—and that
it were required of you to draw all their five decks, the under or
upper side, as their curve showed it, in true foreshortened perspec-
tive, indicating the exact distance each boat had reached at a given
moment from the central point they started from.

If you can do that, you can draw a rose-leaf. Not otherwise. •
§ 2. When, some few years ago, the pre-Raphaelites began to lead
our w^andering artists back into the eternal paths of all great Art,

' I don't know that this is rightly cxpreseedj but the meaning will be understood.'

D 2

36 LEAS' ASPECTS. I'AKT VI.

and showed tliat whatever men drew at all, ought to he drawn
accurately and loiowingly; not blunderingly nor by guess (leaves
of trees, among other things) : as ignorant pride on the one hand
refused their teaching, ignorant hope caught at it on the other.
" What! " said many a feeble young student to himself. " Painting
is not a matter of science then, nor of supreme skill, nor of inventive
brain. I have only to go and paint the leaves of the trees as they
grow, and I shall produce beautiful landscapes directly."

Alas ! my innocent young friend. "Paint the leaves as they
grow!" If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world. These
pre-Raphaelite laws, which you think so light, lay stern on the
strength of Apelles and Zeuxis; put Titian to thoughtful trouble;
are uurelaxed yet, and unrelaxable for ever. Paint a leaf indeed!
Above-named Titian has done it: Correggio, moreover, and
Giorgione: and Leonardo, very nearly, trying hard. Holbein,
three or four times, in precious pieces, highest wrought. Raphael,
it may be, in one or two crowns of Muse or Sibyl. If any one
else, in later times, we have to consider.

§ 3. At least until recently, the perception of organic leaf form was
absolutely, in all painters whatsoever, proportionate to their power of
drawing the human figure. All the great Italian designers drew
leaves thoroughly well, though none quite so fondly as Correggio.
Rubens drew them coarsely and vigorously, just as he drew limbs.
Among the inferior Dutch painters, the leaf-paintmg degenerates
in proportion to the diminishing power in figure. Cuyp, Wouver-
mans, and Paul Potter, paint better foliage than either Hobbima or
Ruysdael.

^ 4. In like manner the power of treating vegetation in sculpture
is absolutely commensurate with nobleness of figure design. The
quantity, richness, or deceptive finish may be greater in third-rate
work; but in true understanding and force of arrangement the
leaf and the human figure show always parallel skill. The leaf-
mouldings of Lorenzo Ghiberti are unrivalled, as his bas-reliefs are,
and the severe foliage of the Cathedral of Chartres is as grand as
its queen-statues.

§ 5. The greatest draughtsmen draw leaves, like everything else, of
their full-life size in the nearest part of the picture. They cannot

liiijasawite

CHAP, V. LEAF ASPECTS.

be rightly drawn on any otlier terms. It is impossible to reduce
a group so treated without losing much of its character; and
more painfully impossible to represent by engraving any good work-
man's handling. • I intended to have inserted in this place an
engraving of the cluster of oak-leaves above Correggio's Antiope in
the Louvre, but it is too lovely; and if I am able to engrave it at all,
it must be separately, and of its own size. So I draw, roughly,
instead, a group of oak-leaves on a young shoot, a little curled
with autumn frost: Plate 53. I could not draw them accurately
enough if I drew them in spring. They would droop and lose
their relations. Thus roughly drawn, and losing some of their
grace, by withering, they, nevertheless, have enough left to show
how noble leaf-form is ; and to prove, it seems to me, that
Dutch draughtsmen do not wholly express it. For instance
Fig. 3, Plate 54, is a facsimile of a bit of the nearest oak foliage
out of Hobbima's Scene with the Water-mill, No. 131, in the
Dulwich Gallery. Compared with the real forms of oak-leaf, in
Plate 53, it may, I hope, at least enable my readers to under-
stand, if they choose, why, never having ceased to rate the
Dutch painters for their meanness or minuteness, I yet accepted
the leaf-painting of the pre-Raphaelites with reverence and hope.

No word has been more harmfully misused than that ugly one
of " niggling." I should be glad if it were entirely banished from
service and record. The only essential question about drawing is
whether it be right or wrong; that it be small or large, swift or
slow, is a matter of convenience only. But so far as the word
may be legitimately used at all, it belongs especially to such
execution as this of Hobbima's—execution which' substitutes, on
whatever scale, a mechanical trick or habit of hand for true
drawing of known or intended forms. So long as the work is
thoughtfully directed, there is no niggling. In a small Greek
coin the muscles of the human body are as grandly treated as in a
colossal statue; and a fine vignette of Turner's will show separate
touches often more extended in intention, and stronger in result,
than those of his largest oil pictures. In the vignette of the
picture of Ginevra, at page 90 of Rogers's Italy, the forefinger
touching the lip is entirely and rightly drawn, bent at the two

LEAF ASPECTS.

joints, witliin the length of the thirtieth of an inch, and the
whole hand within the space of one of those " niggling " touches
of Hobbima. But if this work were magnified, it would be seen
to be a strong and simple expression of a hand by thick black
lines.

§ 7. Niggling, therefore, essentially means disorganized and me-
chanical work, applied on a scale which may deceive a vulgar or
ignorant person into the idea of its being true:—a definition
applicable to the whole of the leaf-painting of the Dutch land-
scapists in distant effect, and for the most part to that of their
near subjects also. Cuyp and Wouvermans, as before stated, and
others, in proportion to their power over the figure, drew leaves
better in the foreground, yet never altogether well; for though
Cuyp often draws a single leaf carefully (weedy ground-vegeta-
tion especially, with great truth), he never felt the connection of
leaves, but scattered them on the boughs at random. Fig. 1 in
Plate 54 is nearly a facsimile of part of the branch on the left side
in our National Gallery picture. Its entire want of grace and
organization ought to be felt at a glance, after the work we have
gone through. The average conditions of leafage-painting among
the Dutch are better represented by Fig. 2, Plate 54, which is a
piece of the foliage from the Cuyp in the Dulwicli Gallery,
No. 163. It is merely wrought with a mechanical play of brush
in a well-trained hand, gradating the colour irregularly and agree-
ably, but with no^ more feeling or knowledge of leafage than a
paperstainer shows in graining a pattern. A bit of the stalk is
seen on the left; it might just as well have been on the other
side, for any connection the leaves have with it. As the leafage
retires into distance, the Dutch painters merely diminish their
scale of touch. The touch itself remains the same, but its effect
is falser; for though the separate stains or blots in Fig. 2, do
not rightly represent the forms of leaves, they may not inaccm-ately
represent the number of leaves on that'spray. But in distance,
when, instead of one spray, we have thousands in sight, no human
industry, nor possible diminution of touch can represent their mist
of foliage, and the Dutch work becomes doubly base, by reason of
false form, and lost infinity.

I

CHAP. V. LEAF ASPECTS. 39

§ 8. Hence what I said in our first inquiry about foliage. " A
single dusty roll of Turner's brush is more truly expressive of the
infinitude of foliage than the niggling of Hobbima could have
rendered his canvass, if he had worked on it till doomsday." And
this brings me to the main difficulty I have had in preparing this
section. That infinitude of Turner's execution attaches not only
to his distant work, but in due degree to the nearest pieces of his
trees. As I have shown in the chapter on mystery, he perfected
the system of art, as applicable to landscape, by the introduction
of this infiniteness. In other qualities he is often only equal, in
some inferior, to great preceding painters ; but in this mystery he
stands alone. He could not paint a cluster of leaves better than
Titian; but he could a bough, much more a distant mass of
foliage. No man ever before painted a distant tree rightly, or a
full-lcaved branch rightly. All Titian's distant branches are
ponderous flakes, as if covered with seaweed, while Veronese's
and Raphael's are conventional, being exquisitely ornamental
arrangements of small perfect leaves. See the background of the
Parnassus in Volpato's plate. It is very lovely, however.

§ 9. But this peculiar execution of Turner's is entirely uncopiable;
least of all to be copied in engraving. It is at once so dexterous
and so keenly cunning, simplest play of hand being applied with
concentrated attention on every movement, that no care in fac-
simile will render it. The delay in the conclusion of this work
has been partly caused by the failure of repeated attempts to
express this execution. I see my way now to some partial result;
but must get the writing done, and give undivided care to it before
I attempt to produce costly plates. Meanwhile, the little cluster
of foliage opposite, from the thicket which runs up the bank on
the right-hand side of the drawing of Richmond, looking up
the river, in the Yorkshire series, will give the reader some idea
of the mingled definiteness and mystery of Turner's work, as
opposed to the mechanism of the Dutch on the one side, and the
conventional severity of the Italians on the other. It should be
compared with the published engraving in the Yorkshire series;
for just as much increase, both in quantity and refinement, would
be necessary in every portion of the picture, before any true con-

40 LEAF ASPECTS. PAET VI,

ception could be given of the richness of Turner's designs. A
fragment of distant foliage I may give farther on; but, in order
to judge rightly of either example, we must know one or two
points in the structure of branches, requiring yet some irksome
patience of inquiry, which I am compelled to ask the reader to
grant me through another two chapters.

41

CHAPTER VL

THE BRANCH.

§ 1. We liave hitlierto spoken of each slioot as either straight or only
warped by its spiral tendency; but no shoot of any length, except
those of the sapling, ever can be straight; for, as the family of
leaves which it bears are forced unanimously to take some given
direction in search of food or light, the stalk necessarily obeys
the same impulse, and bends itself so as to sustain them in their
adopted position, with the greatest ease to itself and comfort
for them.

In doing this, it has two main influences to comply or contend
with: the first, the direct action of the leaves in drawing it this
way or that, as they themselves seek particular situations; the
second, the pressure of their absolute weight after they have taken
their places, depressing each bough in a given degree; the leverage
increasing as the leaf extends. To these principal forces may
frequently be added that of some prevalent wind, which, on a
majority of days in the year, bends the bough, leaves and all,
for hours together, out of its normal position. Owing to these
three forces, the shoot is nearly sure to be curved in at least two
directions that is to say, not merely as the rim of a wine-glass
is curved (so that, looking at it horizontally, the circle becomes a
straight line), but as the edge of a lip or an eyebrow is curved,
partly upwards, partly forwards, so that in no possible perspec-
tive can it be seen as a straight line. Similarly, no perspective

' See the note on Fig. 11, at Page 18, which shows these two directions in a shoot
of lime.

42 THE BEANCH, PART VI.

will usually bring a shoot of a free-growing tree to appear a
straight line.

It is evident that the more leaves the stalk has to sustain,
the more strength it requires. It miglit appear, therefore, not
unadvisable that every leaf should, as it grew, pay a small tax
to the stalk for its sustenance; so that there might be no fear
of any number of leaves being too oppressive to their bearer.
Which, accordingly, is just what the leaves do. Each, from the
moment of his complete majority, pays a stated tax to the stalk;
that is to say, collects for it a certain quantity of wood, or
materials for wood, and sends this wood, or what ultimately will
become wood, down the stalk to add to its thickness.

" Down the stalk ? " yes, and down a great way farther. For,
as the leaves, if they did not thus contribute to their own support,
would soon be too heavy for the spray, so if the spray, with its
family of leaves, contributed nothing to the thickness of the branch,
the leaf-families would soon break down their sustaining branches.
And, similarly, if the branches gave nothing to the stem, the stem
would soon fall under its boughs. Therefore, by a power of
which I believe no sufficient account exists,^ as each leaf adds to
the thickness of the shoot, so each shoot to the branch, so each
branch to the stem, and that with so perfect an order and regu-
larity of duty, that from every leaf in all the countless crowd at
the tree's summit, one slender fibre, or at least fibre's thickness
of,wood, descends through shoot, through spray, through branch,
and through stem; and having thus added, in its due proportion,
to form the strength of the tree, labours yet farther and more
painfully to provide for its security; and thrusting forward into
the root, loses nothing of its mighty energy, until, mining through
the darkness, it has taken hold in cleft of rock or depth

1 I find that the ofiico and nature of cambium, the causcs of the action of the sap,
and the real mode of the fomation of buds, are all still under the iuYcstigation of
botanists. I do not lose time in stating the doubts or probabilities which exist on theso
subjects. For us, the mechanical fact of the increase of thickness by eveiy leaf's action
is all that needs attention. The reader who wishes for infoi-mation as accurate as tlie
present state of science admits, may consult Lindley's Introduction to Botany, and an
interesting little book by Dr. Alexander Hanxy on Trees and their Nature (Nisbct
and Co., 1856), to which I owe much help.

i

CHAP. VI. THE BRANCH. 1627

43

of earth, as extended as the sweep of its green crost in the
free air.

Such at l^least is the mechanical aspect of the tree. The work
of its construction, considered as a branched tower, partly propped
by buttresses, partly lashed by cables, is thus shared in by every
leaf. But considering it as a living body to be nourished, it is
probably an inaccurate analogy to speak of the leaves being taxed
for the enlargement of the trunk. Strictly speaking, the trunk
enlarges by sustaining them. For each leaf, however far removed
from the ground, stands in need of nourishment derived from the
ground, as well as of that which it finds in the air; and it simply
sends its root down along the stem of the tree, until it reaches the
ground and obtains the necessary mineral elements. The trunk
has been therefore called by some botanists a " bundle of roots,"
but I think inaccurately. It is rather a messenger to the roots.^
A root, properly so called, is a fibre, spongy or absorbent at the
extremity, which secretes certain elements from the earth. The
stem is by this definition no more a cluster of roots than a cluster
of leaves, but a channel of intercourse between the roots and the
leaves. It can gather no nourishment. It only carries nourish-
ment, being, in fact, a group of canals for the conveyance of
marketable commodities, with an electric telegraph attached to
each, transmitting messages from leaf to root, and root to leaf, up
and down the tree. But whatever view we take of thfe operative
causes, the external and visible fact is simply that every leaf
does send down from its stalk a slender thread 'of woody matter
along the sides of the shoot it grows upon; and that the increase
of thickness in stem, proportioned to the advance of the leaves,
corresponds with an increase of thickness in roots, proportioned
to the advance of their outer fibres. How far interchange of
elements takes place between root and leaf, it is not our work
here to examine; the general and broad idea is tliis, that the whole
tree is fed partly by the earth, partly by the air;—strengthened and
sustained by the one, agitated and educated by the other;—all of
it which is best, in substance, life, and beauty, being drawn more"

In the true sense, a " mediator " (jxtainje).

44 THE BEANCH. I'ART YI.

from tliG dew of heaven than the fatness of the earth. The results
of this nourishment of the bough by the leaf in external aspect,
are the object of our immediate inquiry,
§ 5. Hitherto we have considered the shoot as an ascending body,
throwing off buds at intervals. This it is indeed; but the part of
it which ascends is not seen externally. Look back to Plate 51.
You will observe that each shoot is furrowed, and that the ridges
between the furrows rise in slightly spiral lines, terminating in the
armlets under the buds which bore last year's leaves. These ridges,
which rib the shoot so distinctly, are not on the ascending part of
it. They are the contributions of each successive leaf thrown out
as it ascended. Every leaf sent down a slender cord, covering and
clinging to the shoot beneath, and increasing its thickness. Each,
according to his size and strength, wove his little strand of cable, as
a spider his thread; and cast it down the side of the springing
tower by a marvellous magic—irresistible ! The fall of a granite
pyramid from an Alp may perhaps be stayed; the descending force
of that silver thread shall not be stayed. It will split the rocks
themselves at its roots, if need be, rather than fail in its work.

So many leaves, so many silver cords. Count—for by just the
thickness of one cord, beneath each leaf, let fall in fivefold order
round and round, the shoot increases in thickness to its root:—
a spire built downwards from the heaven.

And now we see why the leaves dislike being above each other.
Each seeks a vacant place, where he may freely let fall the cord.
The turning aside of the cable to avoid the buds beneath, is one
of the main causes of spiral curvature, as the
shoot increases. It required all the care I could
give to the drawing, and all Mr. Armytage's skill
in engraving Plate 51, to express, though drawing
/ them nearly of their full size, the principal courses

of curvature in even this least graceful of trees.
§ 6. According to the structure thus ascertained,
the body of the shoot may at any point be con-
sidered as formed by a central rod, represented
by the shaded inner circle, a. Fig. 36, surrounded
by as many rods of descending external wood as

CHAP. VI. THE BRANCH. 1629

there are leaves above tlie point wliere tlie section is made. The
first five leaves above send down the first dark rods; and the next
above send down those between, which, being from younger leaves,
are less, but yet fill the interstices; then the third group sending
down the smallest, it will be seen at a glance how a spiral action is
produced. But it would lead us into too subtle detail, if I traced the
forces of this gradual superimposition. I must be content to let the
reader pursue tliis part of the subject for himself, if it amuses him,
and proceed to larger questions.

§ 7. Broadly and practically, we may consider the whole cluster of
woody material in Fig. 36 as one circle of fibrous substance formed
round a small central rod. The real appearance in most trees is
approximately as in h, Fig. 36, the radiating structure becoming
more distinct in proportion to the largeness and compactness of the
wood.^

Now the next question is, how this descending external coating
of wood will behave itself when it comes to the forking of the
shoots. To simplify the examination of this, let us suppose the
original or growing shoot (whose section is the shaded inner circle
in Fig. 36) to have been in the form of a letter
Y, and no thicker than a stout iron wire, as in
Fig. 37. Down the arms of this letter Y, we
have two fibrous streams running in the direc-
tion of the arrows. If the depth or thickness
of these streams be such as at b and c, what
will their thickness be when they unite at e ?
Evidently, the quantity of wood surrounding ^ig- 37.

the vertical wire at e must be twice as great as that surrounding
the wires h and c.

§ 8. The reader will, perhaps, be good enough to take it on my
word (if he does not know enough of geometry to ascertain), that
the large circle, in Fig. 38, contains twice as much area as either
of the two smaller circles. Putting these circles in position, so as
to guide us, and supposing the trunk to be bounded by straight

' The gradual development of this radiating stnicture, which is organic and essen-
tial, composed of what are called by botanists meduUaiy rays, is still a great mystery
and wonder to me.

!

4

THE BEANCH.

lines, we have for the outline of the fork that in Fig. 38. How,
then, do the two minor circles change into one large one ? The sec-
tion of the stem at a is a circle; and at d,
is a circle; and at c, a circle. But what
is it at e? Evidently, if the two circles
merely united gradually, without change
of form through a series of figures, such
as those at the top of Fig. 39, the quantity
of wood, instead of remaining the same,
would diminish from the contents of two
circles to the contents of one. So for
every loss, which the circles sustain at
this junction, an equal quantity of wood
must be thrust out somehow to the side,
circles to run into each
other, as far as shown at
d, in Fig. 39, there must
be a loss between them
of as much wood as the
shaded space. Therefore,
half of that space must
be added, or rather
pushed out on each side,
and the section of the
uniting branch becomes
approximately as in c. Fig. 39; the wood squeezed out encompass-
ing the stem more as the circles close, until the whole is reconciled
into one larger single circle.

§ 9. I fear the reader would have no patience with me, if I asked
him to examine, in longitudinal section, the lines of the descending
currents of wood as they eddy into the increased single river.
Of course, it is just what would take place if two strong streams,
filling each a cylindrical pipe, ran together into one larger cylinder,
with a central rod passing up every tube. But, as this central
rod increases, and, at the same time, the supply of the stream
from above, every added leaf contributing its little current,
the eddies of wood about the fork become intensely curious and

CHAP. VI. THE BRANCH. 47

interesting; of which thus much the reader may observe in a
moment by gathering a branch of any tree (laburnum shows it
better, I think, than most), that the two meeting currents,
first wrinkling a little, then rise in a low wave in the hollow of the
fork, and flow over at the side, making their way to diflftise them-
selves round the stem, as in Fig. 40. Seen
laterally, the bough bulges out below the
fork, rather curiously and awkwardly, espe-
cially if more than two boughs meet at the
same place, growing in one plane, so as to
show the sudden increase on the profile. If
the reader is interested in the subject, he will
find strangely complicated and wonderful
arrangements of stream when smaller boughs
meet larger (one example is given in Plate 3, Vol. III., where the
current of a smaller bough, entering upwards, pushes its way into
the stronger rivers of the stem). But I cannot, of course, enter
into such detail here.

The little ringed accumulation, repelled from the wood of the
larger trunk at the base of small boughs, may be seen at a glance

1

THE BEANCH.

is interesting, because it shows the swelling at the bases of in-
sertion, which yet, Salvator's eye not being quick enough to detect
the law of descent in the fibres, he, with his usual love of ugliness,
fastens on this swollen character, and exaggerates it into an appear-
ance of disease. The same bloated aspect may be seen in the example
already given from another etching, Vol. III., Plate 4, Fig. 8.

§ 11. I do not give any more examples from Claude. We have had
enough already in Plate 4, Vol. III., which the reader should
examine carefully. If he will then look forward to Fig. 61 here,
he will see how Turner inserts branches, and with what certain
and strange instinct of fidelity he marks the wrinkled enlargement
and sinuous eddies of the wood rivers where they meet.

And. remember always that Turner's greatness and rightness
in all these points successively depend on no scientific knowledge.
He was entirely ignorant of all the laws we have been developing.
He had merely accustomed himself to see impartially, intensely,
and fearlessly.

§ 12. It may, perhaps, be interesting to compare, with the rude fal-
lacies of Claude and Salvator, a little piece of earliest art, wrought
by men who could see and feel. The scroll, Fig. 42, is a portion

CHAP. VI. THE BEANCir.

of that which suiTOunds the arch in Sail Zeiio of Verona, above
the pillar engraved in the Stones of Venice, Plate 17, Vol. 1. It is,
therefore, twelfth, or earliest thirteenth century work. Yet the
foliage is already full of spring and life; and in the part of the

stem, which I have given of its real size in Fig. 43, the reader
will perhaps be surprised to see at the junctions the laws of
vegetation, which escaped the sight of all the degenerate landscape-

TOL. T.

50 THE BRANCH.

PART VI.

painters of Italy, expressed by one of her simple architectural
workmen six hundred years ago.

We now know enough, I think, of the internal conditions
which regulate tree-structure to enable us to investigate, finally,
the great laws of branch and stem aspect. But they are very
beautiful; and we will give them a separate chapter.

61

CHAPTER VII.

THE STEM.

§ We must be content, in tliis most complex subject, to advance
very slowly; and our easiest, if not our only way, will be to
examine, first, tlie conditions under wliieli boughs would form,
supposing them all to divide in one plane, as your hand divides
when yon lay it flat on the table, with the fingers as wide apart as
you can. And then we will deduce the laws of ramification which
follow on the real structure of branches, which truly divide, not
ill one plane, but as your fingers separate if you hold a large
round ball Avith them.

The reader has, I hope, a clear idea by this time of the main
principle of tree-growth; namely, that the increase is by addition,
or superimposition, not extension. A branch does not stretch itself
out as a leech stretches its body. But it receives additions at
its extremity, and proportional additions to its thickness. For
although the actual living shoot, or growing point, of any year,
lengthens itself gradually until it reaches its terminal bud, after
that bud is formed, its length is fixed. It is thenceforth one
joint of the tree, like the joint of a pillar, on which other joints of
marble may be laid to elongate the pillar, but which will not itself
stretch. A tree is thus truly edified, or built, like a house.

I am not sure with what absolute stringency this law is
observed, or what slight lengthening of substance may be trace-
able by close measurement among inferior branches. For prac-
tical purposes, we may assume that the law is final, and that
if we represent the state of a plant, or extremity of branch, in
any given year under the simplest possible type. Fig. 44, a, of two

E 2

shoots, with terminal buds, springing from one stem, its growth,
next year may be expressed by the type. Fig. 44, h, in which, the
original stems not changing or increasing, the
terminal buds have built up each another
story of plant, or repetition of the original
form; and, in order to support this new
edifice, have sent down roots all the way to
the ground, so as to enclose and thicken the
inferior stem.

But if this is so, how does the original
stem, which never lengthens, ever become
the tall trunk of a tree ? The arrangement
just stated provides very satisfactorily for
making it stout, but not for malcing it tall.
If the ramification proceeds in this way, the
tree must assuredly become a round compact
ball of short sticks, attached to the ground by a very stout, almost
invisible, stem, like a puff-ball.

For if we take the form above, on a small scale, merely to
see what comes of it, and carry its branching three steps farther,
we get the successive conditions in Fig. 45, of which the last
comes already round to the ground.

" But those forms really look something like trees !" Yes,
if they were on a large scale. But each of the little shoots is only
six or seven inches long ; the whole cluster would but be three or

Tig. 45.

Y ^

four feet over, and touches the ground already at its extremity.
It would enlarge if it went on growing, but never rise from the
ground.

§ 3. This is an interesting question : one, also, which, I fear, we must
solve, so far as yet it can be solved, with little help. Perhaps
nothing is more curious in the history of human mind than the
way in which the science of botany has become oppressed by
nomenclature. Here is perhaps the first question which an intel-

I

CHAP. vii. THE STElil. 53

Hgent child would tliink of asking about a tree: " Mamma, Iioav
does it make its trunk ? " and you may open one botanical work
after another, and good ones too, and by sensible men,—you shall
not find this child's question fairly put, much less fairly answered.
You will be told gravely that a stem has received many names,
such as cuhmts, stipes, and truncus; that twigs were once called
fiagella, but are now called ramuli; and that Mr. Link calls a
straight stem, with branches on its sides, a caulis excurrens;
and a stem, which at a certain distance above the earth breaks
out into irregular ramifications, a caulis deliquescens. All thanks
and honour be to Mr. Link! But at this moment, Avhen we
want to know ^oJiy one stem breaks out " at a certain dis-
tance," and the other not at all, we find no great help in those
splendid excurrencies and deliquesccncies. "At a certain dis-
tance?" Yes: but why not before? or why then? IIow was
it that, for many and many a year, the young shoots agreed to
construct a vertical tower, or, at least, the nucleus of one, and
then, one merry day, changed their minds, and built about their
metropolis in all directions, nobody knows where, far into the
air in free delight? How is it that yonder larch-stem grows
straight and true, while all its branches, constructed by the same
process as the mother trunk, and under the mother trunk's careful
inspection and direction, nevertheless have lost all their manners,
and go forking and flashing about, more like cracklings of spite-
fullest lightning than decent branches of trees that dip green
leaves in dew ?

§ 4. We have probably, many of us, missed the point of such
questions as these, because we too readily associated the structure
of trees with that of flowers. The flowering part of a plant shoots
out or up, in some given direction, until, at a stated period,
it opens or branches into perfect form by a law just as fixed,
and just as inexplicable, as that which numbers the joints of
an animal's skeleton, and puts the head on its right joint. In
many forms of flowers—foxglove, aloe, hemlock, or blossom of
maize—the structure of the floAvering part so far assimilates itself
to that of a tree, that we not unnaturally think of a tree only as
a large flower, or large remnant of flower, run to seed. And we

54 THE STEM. TAEX VI.

suppose tlie time and place of its brandling to be just as organically
determined as the height of the stalk of straw, or hemlock pipe>
and the fashion of its branching just as fixed as the shape of
petals in a pansy or cowslip.

§ 5. But that is not so ; not so in anywise. So far as you can
•watch a tree, it is produced throughout by repetitions of the same
process, which repetitions, however, are arbitrarily directed so as
to produce one cfFect at one time, and another at another time. A
young sapling has his branches as much as the tall tree. He does
not shoot up in a long thin rod, and begin to branch when he is ten
or fifteen feet high, as the hemlock or foxglove does when each has
reached its ten or fifteen inches. The young sapling conducts
himself with all the dignity of a tree from the first;—only he so
manages his branches as to form a support for his future life, in a
strong straight trunk, that will hold him well off the ground.
Prudent little sapling !—but how does he manage tins ? how keep
the young branches from rambling about, till the proper time, or
on what plea dismiss them from his service if they will not help
his provident purpose? So again, there is no difference in mode
of construction between the trunk of a pine and its branch. But
external circumstances so far interfere with the results of this re-
peated construction, that a stone pine rises for a hundred feet like a
pillar, and then suddenly bursts into a cloud. It is the knowledge
of the mode in which such change may take place which forms
the true natural history of trees;—or, more accurately, their moral
history. An animal is born with so many limbs, and a head of
such a shape. That is, strictly speaking, not its history, but one fact
in its history: a fact of which no other account can be given than
that it was so appointed. But a tree is born without a head. It
has got to make its own head. It is born like a little family from
which a great nation is to spring; and at a certain time, under
peculiar external circumstances, this nation, every individual of
which remains the same in nature and temper, yet gives itself a
new political constitution, and sends out branch colonies, wliich
enforce forms of law and life entirely different from those of the
parent state. That is the history of the state. It is also the history
of a tree, W

§ 6. Of these hidden histories, I know and can tell you as little as
I did of the making of rocks. It will be enough for me if I can
piit the difficulty fairly before you, show you clearly such facts as
are necessary to the understanding of great Art, and so leave you
to pursue, at your pleasure, the graceful mystery of this imperfect
leafage life.

I took in the outset the type of a triple bud as the most general
that could be given of all trees, because it represents a prevalently
upright main tendency, with a capacity of branching on both sides.
I would have shown the power of branching on all sides
if I could ; but we must be content at first with the
simplest condition. From what we have seen since of bud
structure, we may now make our type more complete
by giving each bud a root proportioned to its size. And
our elementary type of tree plant will be as in Fig. 46.

§ 7. Now these three buds, though differently placed, have all one
mind. No bud has an oblique mind. Every one would like,
if he could, to grow upright, and it is because the midmost
one has entirely his own way in this matter, that he is largest.
He is an elder brother; — his birthright is to grow straight
towards the sky. A younger child may perhaps supplant him,
if he does not care for his privilege. In the meantime all are
of one family, and love each other,—so that the two lateral buds
do not stoop aside because they like it, but to let their more
favoured brother grow in peace. All the three buds and roots have
at heart the "same desire;—which is, the one to grow as straight
as he can towards bright heaven, the other as deep as he can
into dark earth. Up to light, and down to shade;—into air and
into rock:—that is their mind and purpose for ever. So far as
they can, in kindness to each other, and by sufferance of external
circumstances, work out that destiny, they will. But their beauty will
not result from their working it out,—only from their maintained
purpose and resolve to do so, if it may be. They will fail—certainly
two, perhaps all three of them : fail egregiously;—ridiculously;—
it may be, agonizingly. Instead of growing up, they may be
wholly sacrificed to happier buds above, and have to grow down,
sideways, roundabout ways, all sorts of ways. Instead of getting-

down quietlj into tlie convent of the earth, they may have to cling
and crawl about hardest and hottest angles of it, full in sight of man
and beast, and roughly trodden under foot by them;—stumbling-
blocks to many.

Yet out of such sacrifice, gracefully made—such misfortune,
gloriously sustained—all their true beauty is to arise. Yes, and
from more than sacrifice—more than misfortune: from death.
Yes, and more than death:—from the worst kind of death: not
natural, coming to each in its due time; but premature, oppressed,
unnatural, misguided—or so it would seem—to the poor dying
sprays. Yet, without such death, no strong trunk were ever
possible; no grace of glorious limb or glittering leaf; no com-
panionship with the rest of nature or with man.

§ Let us see how this must be. We return to our poor little

threefold type. Fig. 46, above. Next year he will become as in
Fig. 47. The two lateral buds keeping as
much as may be out of their brother's way,
and yet growing upwards with a will, strike
diagonal lines, and in moderate comfort
accomplish their year's life and terminal
buds. But what is to be done next? Form-
ing the triple terminal head on this diagonal
line, we find that one of our next year's buds,
c, will have to grow down again, which is
very hard; and another, h, will run right
against the lateral branch of the upper bud,
a, which must not be allowed under any circumstances.

What are we to do ? j

§ The best we can. Give up our straightness, and some of our

length, and consent to grow short, and
crooked. Bud h shall be ordered to stoop
forward and keep his head out of the great
bough's w^ay, as in Fig. 48, and grow as he
best may, with the consumptive pain in his
chest. To give him a little more room,
the elder brother, a, shall stoop a little
forward also, recovering himself when

CHAP. VIII. THE LEAF M01^U3i^ENTS. 69

m

THE STEM.

he lias got out of b's way; and bud c shall bo encouraged to
bend himself bravely round and up, after his first start in that
disagreeable downward direction. Poor b, withdrawn from air
and light between a and a, and having to live stooping besides,
cannot make much of himself, and is stunted and feeble, c, having
fi-ee play for his energies, bends up with a will, and becomes
handsomer, to our minds, than if he had been straight; and a is
none the worse for his concession to unhappy h in early life.

So far Avell for this year. But how for next? b is already too
near the spray above him, even for his own strength and comfort;
much less, with his weak constitution, will he be able to throw up
any strong new shoots. And if he did, they would only run into
those of the bough above. (If the reader will proceed in the con-
struction of the whole figure he will see that this is so.) Under
these discouragements and deficiencies, h is probably frostbitten,
and drops oflp. The bough proceeds, mutilated, and itself somewhat
discouraged. But it re-
peats its sincere and good-
natured compliances, and
at the close of the year,
new wood from all the
leaves having concealed
the stump, and effaced
the memory of poor lost
b, and perhaps a conso-
latory bud lower down
having throAvn out a tiny
spray to make the most F'g- 49.

of the vacant space near the main stem, we shall find the bough
in some such shape as Fig. 49.

§ 10. Wherein we already see the germ of our irregularly bending
branch, which might ultimately be much the prettier for the loss
of b. Alas! the Fates have forbidden even this. While the low
bough is making all these exertions, the boughs of a, above him,
higher in air, have made the same under happier auspices.
Every year their thicker leaves more and more forbid the light;
and, after rain, shed their own drops unwittingly on the unfor-

58 THE STEM. PAiiTvi.

tunate lower bougli,' and prevent the air or sun from drying liis
I bark or checking the chill in liis medullary rays. Slowly a hope-

^ less languor gains upon him. He buds here or there, faintl}'^, in

the spring; but the flow of strong wood from above oppresses
him even about his root, where it joins the trunk. The very sap
does not turn aside to him, but rushes up to the stronger, laughing
leaves far above. Life is no more worth having; and abandoning
all effort, the poor bough drops, and finds consummation of destiny
in helping an old woman's fire.

"When he is gone, the one next above is left with greater
freedom, and will shoot now from points of its sprays which were
before likely to perish. Hence another condition of irregularity
• in form. But that bough also will fall in its turn, though after

longer persistence. Gradually thus the central trunk is built, and
the branches by whose help it was formed cast ofi^, leaving hero
and there scars, which are all effaced by years, or lost sight of
among the roughnesses and furrows of the aged surface. The
work is continually advancing, and thus the head of foliage on
any tree is not an expansion at a given height, like a flower-bell,
but the collective group of boughs, or workmen, who have got up
so far, and will get up higher next year, still losing one or two
of their number underneath.
§ 11. So far well. But this only accounts for the formation of a
vertical trunk. How is it that at a certain height this vertical
trunk ceases to be built; and irregular branches spread in all
directions ?

First: In a great number of trees, the vertical trunk never
ceases to be built^ It is confused, at the top of the tree, among
other radiating branches, being at first, of course, just as slender as
they, and only prevailing over them in time. It shows at the
top the same degree of irregularity and undulation as a sapling:
and is transformed gradually into straightness lower down (see
Fig. 50). The reader has only to take an hour's ramble, to see
for himself how many trees are thus constructed, if circumstances
are favourable to their growth. Again, the mystery of blossoming
lias great influence in increasing the tendency to dispersion among
the upper boughs: but this part of vegetative structure I cannot

CHAP. VIII. THE LEAF M01^U3i^ENTS. 69

THE STEM.

enter into; it is too subtle, and has, besides,' no absolute bearing
on our subject; tlie principal conditions wliich produce the varied
play of branches being purely medianical. The point at which
they show a determined tendency to spread is generally to be con-
ceived as a place of rest for the tree, where it has reached the
height from, the ground at wliich ground-mist, imperfect circula-
tion of air, &c. have ceased to operate injuriously on it, and where
it has free room, and air, and light for its growth.

§ 12. I find there is quite an infinite interest in watching the different
ways in which trees part their sprays at this resting-place, and the
sometimes abrupt, sometimes gentle and undiscoverable, severing
of the upright stem into the wandering and wilful branches ; but
a volume, instead of a chapter or two, and quite a little gallery of
plates, would be needed to illustrate the various grace of this
division, associated as it is with an exquisitely
subtle effacing of undulation in the thicker
stems, by the flowing down of the wood from
above; the curves which are too violent
in the branches being filled up, so that what
was as at a, Fig. 50, becomes as at and
when the main stem is old, passes at last into
straightness by almost imperceptible curves, a
continually gradated emphasis of curvature
being carried to the branch extremities.

§ 13. Hitherto we have confined ourselves
entirely to examination of stems in one plane.
"We must glance—though only to ascertain
how impossible it is to do more than glance—
at the conditions of form which result from the
throwing out of branches, not in one plane,
but on all sides. As your fingers divide when
they hold a ball," I said: or, better, a large cup,
without a handle. Consider how such rami-
fication will appear in one of the bud groups,
that of our old firiend the oak. We saw it
opened usually into five shoots. Imagine,
then (Fig. 51), a five-sided cup or funnel Fig. 51.

60 THE STEM, I'ART VI.

with a stout rod running through the centre of it. In the figure
it is seen from ahove, so as partly to show the inside, and a little
obliquely, that the central rod may not hide any of the angles.
Then let us suppose that, where the angles of this cup were, we have,
instead, five rods, as in Fig. 52, A, like the ribs of a pentagonal

umbrella turned inside out by the wind. I dot the pentagon which
connects their extremities, to keep their positions clear. Then these
five rods, with the central one, will represent the five shoots, and
the leader, from a vigorous young oak-spray. Put the leaves on
each; the five-foiled star at its extremity, and the others, now not
quite formally, but still on the whole as in Fig. 3 above, and wo
have the result, Fig. 52, u—rather a pretty one.

By considering the various aspects which the five rods would
take in Fig. 52, as the entire group was seen from below or above,
and at different angles and distances, the reader may find out for
himself what changes of aspect are possible in even so regular a
structure as this. But the branchings soon take more com-
plex symmetry. We knoM' that next year each of these five
subordinate rods is to enter into life on its own account, and
to repeat the branching of the first. Thus, we shall have five

CHAP. VIII. THE LEAF M01^U3i^ENTS. 69

pentagonal cups surrounding a large central pentagonal cup.
This figure, if the reader likes a pretty perspective problem, he
may construct for his own pleasure:—which having done, or con-
ceived, he is then to apply the great principles of subjection and
resilience, not to three branches only, as in Fig. 49, but to the five
of each cup;—by which the cups get flattened out and bent up, as you
may have seen vessels of Venetian glass, so that every cup actually
takes something the shape of a thick aloe or artichoke leaf; and
they surround the central one, not as a bunch of grapes surrounds
a grape at the end of it, but as the petals grow round the centre
of a rose. So that any one of these lateral branches—though, seen

n

Fig. 53.

from above, it would present a symmetrical figure, as if it were
not flattened (a, Fig. 53)—seen sideways, or in profile, will show
itself to be at least as much flattened as at B.

§ 15. You may thus regard the whole tree as composed of a series
of such thick, flat, branch-leaves; only incomparably more varied
and enriched in framework as they spread; and arranged more
or less in spirals round the trunk. Gather a cone of a Scotch
fir; begin at the bottom of it, and pull off the seeds, so as to show
one of the spiral rows of them continuously, from the bottom to
the top, leaving enough seeds above them to support the row.
Then the gradual lengthening of the seeds from the root, their
spiral arrangement, and their limitation within a curved, convex
form, furnish the best severe type you can have of the branch
system of all stemmed trees; and each seed of the cone represents,
not badly, the sort of flattened solid leaf-shape which all complete

iv

THE STElkf.

brandies have. Also, if you will try to draw the spiral of the
fir-cone, you will understand something about tree-perspective,
which may be generally useful. Finally, if you note the way
in which the seeds of the cone slip each farther and farther over
each other, so as to change sides in the middle of the cone, and
obtain a reversed action of spiral lines in the upper half, you
may imagine what a piece of work it would be for both of us,
if we were to try to follow the complexities of branch order in
trees of irregular growth, such as the rhododendron. I tried
to do it, at least, for the pine, in section, but saw I was getting
into a perfect maelstrom of spirals, from which no efforts would
have freed me, in any imaginable time, and the only safe way was
to keep wholly out of the stream.

The alternate system, leading especially to the formation of
forked trees, is more manageable; and if the reader is master
of perspective, he may proceed some distance in the examination
of that for himself. But I do not care to frighten the general
reader by many diagrams: the book is always sure to open
at them when he takes it up. I will venture on one which
has perhaps something a little amusing about it, and is really of
importance.

Let X, Fig. 54, represent a shoot of any opposite-leaved tree.
The mode in which it will grow into a tree depends, mainly, on

\1/

X

Fig. 54.

THE STEM.

Eig. 55.

one in the tree on the left in the " Chateau of La belle Gabrielle
the leading bough, going on in its own curve, throws off, first, a
bough to the right, then one to the left, then two small ones to the
right, and proceeds itself, hidden by leaves, to form the farthest
upper point of the branch.

The lower secondary bough—the first thrown off—proceeds
in its own curve, branching first to left, then to right.

The upper bough proceeds in the same way, throwing off
first to left, then to right. And this is the commonest and most
graceful structure. But if the tree loses the leader, as at c. Fig. 54
(and many opposite trees have a trick of doing so), a very curious
result is arrived at, which I will give in a geometrical form.

§ 18. The number of branches which die, so as to leave the main
stem bare, is always greatest low down, or near the interior of the
tree. It follows that the lengths of stem which do not fork
diminish gradually to the extremities, in a fixed proportion. This
is a general law. Assume, for example's sake, the stem to sepa-
rate always into two branches, at an equal angle, and that each
branch is three-quarters of the length of the preceding one.
Diminish their thicknesses in proportion, and carry out the figure
any extent you like. In Plate 56, opposite, Fig. 1, you have
it at its ninth branch; in which I wish you to notice, first, the
delicate curve formed by every complete line of the brandies
(compare Vol. lY. Fig. 91); and, secondly, the very curious result
of the top of the tree being a broad flat line, which passes at an
angle into lateral shorter lines, and so down to the extremities.
It is this property which renders the contours of tops of trees so

intensely difficult to draw rightly, without making tlieir curves too
smooth and insipid.

Observe, also, that the great weight of the foliage being thrown
on the outside of each main fork, the tendency of forked trees is
very often to droop and diminish the bough on one side, and erect
the other into a principal mass.^

§ 19. But the form in a perfect tree is dependent on the revolution
of this sectional profile, so as to produce a mushroom-shaped or
cauliflower-shaped mass, of which I leave the reader to enjoy the
perspective drawing by himself, adding, after he has completed it,
the effect of the law of resilience to the extremities. Only, lie
must note this: that in real trees, as the branches rise from the
ground, the open spaces underneath arc partly filled by subse-
quent branchings, so that a real tree has not so much the shape
of a mushroom, as of an apple, or, if elongated, a pear.

§ 20. And now you may just begin to understand a little of Turner's
meaning in those odd pear-shaped trees of his, in the " Mercury and
Argus," and other such compositions : which, however, before we
can do completely, we must gather our evidence together, and see
what general results will come of it respecting the hearts and
fancies of trees, no less than their forms.

' This is Harding's favourite form of tree. You will find it much insisted on
in his works on foliage. I intended to have given a figiu-e to show the results of the
pressure of the weight of all the leafage on a great lateral bough, in modifyirg ils
curves, the strength of timber being greatest where the leverage of the mass tells most.
But I find nobody ever reads things which it takes any trouble to understand, so that
it is of no use to write them.

i

65

CHAPTER VIII.

THE LEAF MONUMENT?.

§ 1. And now, having ascertained in its main points tlie system on
which the leaf-workers build, let us see, finally, what results in
aspect, and appeal to human mind, their building must present.
In some sort it resembles that of the coral animal, differing, how-
ever, in two main points. First, the animal which forms branched
coral, builds, I believe, in calm water, and has few accidents of
current, light, or heat to contend with. He builds in monotonous
ramification, untormented, therefore unbeautiful. Secondly, each
coral animal builds for himself, adding his cell to what has been
before constructed, as a bee adds another cell to the comb. He
obtains no essential connection with the root and foundation of the
whole structure. That foundation is thickened clumsily, by a fused
and encumbering aggregation, as a stalactite increases;—not by
tlireads proceeding from the extremities to the root.

§ 2. The leaf, as we have seen, builds in both respects under oppo-
site conditions. It leads a life of endurance, effort, and various
success, issuing in various beauty; and it connects itself with the
whole previous edifice by one sustaining thread, continuing its
appointed piece of work all the way from top to root. Whence
result three great conditions in branch aspect, for which I cannot
find good names, but must use the imperfect ones of " Spring,"
« Caprice," « Fellowship."

§ 3. I. Spring : or tlie appearance of elastic and progressive power,
as opposed to that look of a bent piece of cord.—This follows
partly on the poise of the bough, partly on its action in seeking

7G THE LEAF BIONUMENTS. PART VI.

curve accurately showing the relations between the strength of the
sprays in that position (growing downward, upward, or laterally),
and the weight of leaves they carry; and again, it takes a curve
expressive of the will or aim of those sprays, during all their life,
and handed down from sire to son, in steady inheritance of resolu-
tion to reach forward in a given direction, or bend away from some
given evil influence.

And all these proportionate strengths and measured efforts of
the bough produce its loveliness, and ought to be felt, in looking
at it, not by any mathematical evidence, but by the same fine
instinct which enables us to perceive, when a girl dances rightly,
that she moves easily, and with delight to herself; that her limbs
are strong enough, and her body tender enough, to move precisely
as she wills them to move. You cannot say of any bend of arm
or foot -svhat precise relations of their curves to the whole figure
manifest, in their changeful melodies, that ease of motion; yet
you feel that they do so, and you feel it by a true instinct.
And if you reason on the matter farther, yoU may know, though
you cannot see, that an absolute mathematical necessity proportions
every bend of the body to the rate and direction of its motion; and
that the momentary fancy and fire of the will measure them-
selves, even in their gaily-fancied freedom, by stern laws of
nervous life, and material attraction, which regulate eternally
every pulse of the strength of man, and every sweep of the stars
of heaven.

Observe, also, the balance of the bough of a tree is quite as
subtle as that of a figure in motion. It is a balance between
the elasticity of the bough and the weight of^ leaves, affected
in curvature, literally, by the growth of every leaf; and besides
this, when it moves, it is partly supported by the resistance
of the air, greater or less, according to the shape of leaf;—so
that branches float on the wind more than they yield to it;
and in their tossing do not so much bend under a force, as
rise on a wave, which penetrates in liquid threads through all
their sprays.

I am not sure how far, by any illustration, I can exemplify these
subtle conditions of form. All my plans have been shortened, and

CBAP. vin. Tim LEAF MONUMENTS. 67

I have learned to content myself with yet more contracted issues
of them after the shortening, because I know that nearly all in
such matters must he said or shown, unavailahly. No saying will
teach the truth. Nothing but doing. If the reader Avill draw
boughs of trees long and faithfully, giving previous pains to gain
the power (how rare!) of drawing anything faithfully, he will
come to see what Turner's work is, or any other right work, but
not by reading, nor thinking, nor idly looking. However, in
some degree, even our ordinary instinctive perception of grace
and balance may serve us, if we choose to pay any accurate
attention to the matter.

§ 6. Look back to Fig. 55. That bough of Turner's is exactly and
exquisitely poised, leaves and all, for its present horizontal position.
Turn the book so as to put the spray upright, with the leaves at the
top. You ought to see they would then be wrong;—that they must,
in that position, have adjusted themselves more directly above the
main stem, and more firmly, the curves of the lighter sprays being
a deflection caused by their weight in the horizontal position.
Again, Fig. 56 represents, enlarged to four times the size of the
original, the two Scotch firs in Turner's etching of Inverary.^
These are both in perfect poise, representing a double action: the
warping of the trees away from the sea-wind, and the continual
growing out of the boughs on the right-hand side, to recover
the balance.

Turn the page so as to be horizontal, and you ought to feel
that, considered now as branches, both would be out of balance.
If you turn the heads of the trees to your right, they are wrong,
because gravity would have bent them more downwards; if to your
left, wrong, because the law of resilience would have raised them
more at the extremities.

§ 7. Now take two branches of Salvator's, Fig. 57 and 58.- You

1 They arc enlarged, partly, in order to show the care and minuteness of Turner's
drawing on the sniallest scale, partly to save the reader the trouble of using a magnily-
ing glass, partly because this woodcut will print safely; while if I had facsimiled the
fine Turner ctching, the block might have been spoiled after a hundred impressions.

® Magnified to twice the size of the original, but othenvisc fucsimilcd from his OAvn
etchings of GEdipus, and tho School of Plato.

F 2

CHAP. VIII. THE LEAF M01^U3i^ENTS. 69

sustain the leaves ; and tliat if it were, tliose leaves themselves arc in
broken or forced relations with each other. Such relations might,
indeed, exist in a partially withered tree, and one of these branches
is intended to be partially withered, but the other is not; and if it
were, Salvator's choice of the withered tree is precisely the sign of
his preferring ugliness to beauty, decrepitude and disorganization
to life and youth. The leaves on the spray, by Durer, hold them-
selves as the girl holds herself in dancing; those on Salvator's,
as an old man, partially palsied, totters along with broken motion,
and loose deflection of limb.

§ 8. Next, let us take a spray by Paul Yeronese^—the lower figure
in Plate 57. It is just as if we had gathered one out of the
garden. Though every line and leaf in the quadruple group is
necessary to join with other parts of the composition of the noble
picture, every line and leaf is also as free and true as if it were
growing. None are confused, yet none are loose; all are individual,
yet none separate, in tender poise of pliant strength and fair order
of accomplished grace, each, by due force of the indulgent bough,
set and sustained.

§ 9. Observe, however, that in all these instances from earlier
masters, the expression of the universal botanical laAv of poise is
independent of accuracy in rendering of species. As before
noticed, the neglect of specific distinction long restrained the
advance of landscape, and even hindered Tunier himself in many
respects. The sprays of Veronese are a conventional type of
laurel; Albert Durer's an imaginary branch of paradisaical vege-
tation; Salvator's, a rude reminiscence of sweet chestnut; Turner's
only is a faithful rendering of the Scotch fir.

§ 10. To show how the principle of balance is carried out by
Nature herself, here is a little terminal upright spray of willow,

' The largest laurel spray in the background of the " Susanna," liouvrc—rcduced to
about a fifth of the original. The drawing was made for me by M. Hippolyte Dubois,
and I am glad it is not one of my own, lest I should be charged with cxaggeratinj^
Veronese's accuracy.

This group of leaves is, in the original, of the life-size; the circle which interferes
with the spray on the right being the outline of the head of one of the elders ; and, as
painted for distant effect, there is no care in completing the stems:—they are struck
with a few broken touches of the brush, which cannot be imitated in the engi-aving, and
much of theii- spirit is lost in conscquencc.

Hi

CHAP. VIII. THE LEAF M01^U3i^ENTS. 69

sustain the leaves ; and tliat if it wercj tliose leaves themselves arc in
broken or forced relations with each other. Such relations might,
indeed, exist in a partially withered tree, and one of these branches
is intended to be partially withered, but the other is not; and if it
were, Salvator's choice of the withered tree is precisely the sign of
his preferring ugliness to beauty, decrepitude and disorganization
to life and youth. The leaves on the spray, by Durer, hold them-
selves as the girl holds herself in dancing; those on Salvator's,
as an old man, partially palsied, totters along with broken motion,
and loose deflection of limb.

§ 8. Next, let us take a spray by Paul Veronese^—the lower figure
in Plate 57. It is just as if we had gathered one out of the
garden. Though every line and leaf in the quadruple group is
necessary to join with other parts of the composition of the noble
picture, every line and leaf is also as free and true as if it were
growing. None are confused, yet none are loose; all are individual,
yet none separate, in tender poise of pliant strength and fair order
of accomplished grace, each, b}^ due force of the indulgent bough,
set and sustained.

§ 9. Observe, hoAvever, that in all these instances from earlier
masters, the expression of the universal botanical law of poise is
independent of accuracy in rendering of species. As before
noticed, the neglect of specific distinction long restrained the
advance of landscape, and even hindered Turner himself in many
respects. The sprays of Yeronese are a conventional type of
laurel; Albert Durer's an imaginary branch of paradisaical vege-
tation; Salvator's, a rude reminiscence of sweet chestnut; Turner's
only is a faithful rendering of the Scotch fir.

§ 10, To show how the principle of balance is carried out by
Nature herself, here is a little terminal upright spray of willow,

I Tlic largest laurel spray in the background of the " Susanna," Louvre—reduced to
about a fifth of the original. The drawing was made for rae by M. Hippolytc Dubois,
and I am glad it is not one of my own, lest I should be charged with exaggerating
Veronese's accuracy.

This group of leaves is, in the original, of the life-size; the circlc which interferes
with the spray on the right being the outline of the head of one of the elders ; and, as
painted for distant cffect, there is no care in completing the stems:—they arc struck
with a few broken touches of the brush, which cannot be imitated in the engraving, and
much of their spirit is lost in conEcquence.

mmrnrn

PART VI.

THE LEAF MOKUMENTS.

the most graceful of English trees (Fig. 59).
I have drawn it carefully; and if the reader
will study its curves, or, better, trace and
pencil them with a perfectly fine point, he will
feel, I think, without difficulty, their finished
relation to the leaves they sustain. Then, if
we turn suddenly to a piece of Dutch branch-
drawing (Fig. 60), facsimiled from No. 160,
Dulwich Gallery (Berghem), he will under-
stand, I believe, also the qualities of that, with-
out comment of mine. It is of course not so
dark in the original, being drawn Avith the
chance dashes of a brush loaded with brown,
but the contours are absolutely as in the

I. ■■

CHAP. VIII. THE LEAF M01^U3i^ENTS. 69

71

woodcut. Tliis Dutch design is a very clmracteristic example
of two faults in tree-drawing; namely, the loss not only of
grace and spring, but of woodiness. A branch is not elastic as
steel is, neither as a carter's whip is. It is a combination, wholly
peculiar, of elasticity with half-dead and sapless stubborn-
ness, and of continuous curve with pauses of knottiness, every
bough having its blunted, affronted, fatigued, or repentant mo-
ments of existence, and mingling crabbed rugosities and fretful
changes of mind Avith the main tendencies of its growth. The
piece of pollard willow opposite (Fig. 61), facsimiled from Turner's
etching of "Young Anglers," in the Liber Studiorum, has all
these characters in perfectness, and may serve for sufficient study
of them. It is impossible to explain in what the expression of the
woody strength consists, unless it be felt. One very obvious con-
dition is the excessive fineness of curvature, approximating con-
tinnally to a straight line. In order to get a piece of branch
curvature given as accurately as I could by an unprejudiced
person, I set one of my pupils at the Working Men's College (a
joiner by trade) to draw, last spring, a lilac branch of its real size,
as it grew, befpre it budded. It was about six feet long, and
before he could get it quite right, the buds came out and inter-
rupted him ; but the fragment he got drawn is engraved in flat
profile, in Plate 58, It has suffered much by reduction, one or
two of its finest curves havhig become lost in the mere thickness
of the lines. Nevertheless, if the reader will compare it carefully
with the Dutch work, it will teach him something about trees.

11. Capeioe.—The next character we had to note of the leaf-
builders was their capriciousness, noted, partly, in Vol. III. chap,
ix. § 14. It is a character connected with the ruggedness and
ill-tempercdness just spoken of, and an essential spurce of branch
beauty: being in reality the written story of all the branch's life,
—of the theories it formed, the accidents it suffered, the fits of
enthusiasm to which it yielded in certain delicious warm springs;
the disgusts at weeks of east wind, the mortifications of itself for
its friends' sakes; or the sudden and successful inventions of new
ways of getting out to the sun. The reader will understand this
character in a moment, by merely comparing Fig. 62, which is a

7G THE LEAF BIONUMENTS. PART VI.

1.

J

■ vi

«I

I

You cannot but feel at once, not only the wrongness of Salvator's,
but its dulness. It is not now a question either of poise, or grace,
or gravity; only of wit. That bough has got no sense; it has
not been struck by a single new idea from tlie beginning of it
to the end; dares not even cross itself with one of its own
sprays. You will be amazed, in taking up any of these old
engravings, to see how seldom the boughs do cross each other.
Whereas, in nature, not only is the intersection of i.extremities a
mathematical necessity (see Plate 56), but out of this intersection
and crossing of curve by curve, and the opposition of line it involves,
the best part of their composition arises. Look at the way the
boughs are interwoven in that piece of lilac stem (Plate 58).

Again : As it seldom struck the old painters that boughs
must cross each other, so it never seems to have occurred
to them that they must be sometimes foreshortened. I chose
this bit from ^'Aske Hall," that you might see at once, both
how Turner foreshortens the main stem, and how, in doing

' The longest in "Apollo and tlie Sibyl," engraved by Boydell. (Ecduced one-half.)

so, lie shows tlie turning aside, and outwards, of the one
next to it, to the left, to get more air.^ Indeed, this fore-
shortening lies at the core of the business; for unless it he well
understood, no branch-form can ever be rightly drawn. I placed
the oak spray in Plate 51, so as to be seen as nearly straight on its
flank as possible. It is the
most uninteresting position
in which a bough can be
drawn; but it shows the first
simple action of the law of
resilience. I will now turn
the bough with its extremity
towards us, and foreshorten
it (Plate 59), which being
done, you perceive another
tendency in the whole branch,
not seen at all in the first
Plate, to throw its sprays to
its own right (or to your
left), which it does to avoid
the branch next it, while
the foricard action is in a
sweeping curve round to
your right, or to the branch's
left: a curve which it takes
to recover position after its
first concession. The lines of
the nearer and smaller shoots
are very nearly—thus fore-
shortened—those of a boat's
bow. Here is a piece of

Dutch foreshortening for you
to compare with it, Fig. 64."

' The foreshortening of the bough to the right is a piece of great audacity ; it
comes towards us t\vo or three feet sharply, after forking, so as to look suddenly half as
thick again as at the fork;—then bends back again, and outAvards.

* Hobbima. Dulwich Gallery, No. 131. Turn the book with its outer edge down.

§ 13.

THE LEAF MONmiENTS,

In this final perfection of bough-drawing, Turner stands wholly
alone. Even Titian does not foreshorten his boughs rightly. Of
course he could, if he had cared to do so; for if you can foreshorten
a limb or a hand, much more a tree branch. But either he had
never looked at a tree carefully enough to feel that it was neces-
sary, or, which is more likely, he disliked to introduce in a back-
ground elements of vigorous projection. Be the reason what
it may, if you take- Lefevre's plates of the Peter Martyr and
St. Jerome—the only ones I know which give any idea of Titian's
tree-drawing, you will observe at once that the boughs lie in
flakes, artificially set to the right and left, and are not intricatf
or varied, even where the foliage indicates some foreshorten^
ing;—completing thus the evidence for my statement long ago
given, that no man but Turner had ever draAvn the stem of
a tree.

It may be well also to note, for the advantage of tlie general
student of design, that, in foliage and bough drawhig, all the final
grace and general utility of the study depend on its being well
foreshortened ; and that, till the power of doing so quite accurately
is obtained, no landscape-drawing is of the least value; nor can
the character of any tree be known at all until not only its
branches, but its minutest extremities, have been draAvn in the
severest foreshortening, with little accompanying plans of the
arrangements of the leaves or buds, or thorns, on the stem-

rig. 66.

Thus Fig. 65 is the extremity of a single shoot of spruce fir, fore-
shortened, showing the resilience of its swords from beneath; and

THE LEAF MONUMENTS.

Fig. 66 is a little ground-plan, showing the position of the throe
lowest triple groups of thorn on a shoot of gooseberry,^ The
fir shoot is carelessly drawn; but it is not worth while to do it
better, unless I engraved it on steel, so as to show the fine relations
of shade.

§ 13, III, Fellowship.—The compactness of mass presented by this
little sheaf of pine-swords may lead us to the consideration of
the last character I have to note of boughs; namely, the mode
of their association in masses. It follows, of course, from all
the laAvs of growth we have ascertained, that the terminal outline
of any tree or branch must be a simple one, containing within
it, at a given height or level, the series of leaves of the year;
only we have not yet noticed the kind of form Avhich results, in
each branch, from the part it has to take in forming the mass

' Their change from gi-oups of three to gi-oups of two, .mcl then to single thonis at
the end of the spray, will bo found very beautiftil in a real shoot. The figure on the
left in Plate 52 is a branch of blackthorn with its spines (which are a peculiar condition
of branch, and can bud like branches, while thorns have no root nor power of develop-
ment), Such a branch gives good practice without too mivch difficulty.

7G THE LEAF BIONUMENTS. PART VI.

of the tree. The systems of branching are indeed infinite, and
could not be exemplified by any number of types; but liere
are two common types, in section, which will enough explain
what I mean.

§ 16. If a tree branches with a concave tendency, it is apt to carry
its boughs to the outer curve of limitation, as at A, Fig. 67, and
if with a convex tendency, as at B. In either case the vertical
section, or profile, of a bough will give a triangular mass, termi-
nated by curves, and elongated at one extremity. These trian-
gular masses you may see at a glance, prevailing in the branch
system of any tree in winter. They may, of course, bo mathe-
matically reduced to the four types a, h, c, and d, Fig. 67, but
are capable of endless variety of expression in action, and in the
adjustment of their weights to the bearing stem.

§ 17. To conclude, then, we find that the beauty of these buildings
of the leaves consists, from the first step of it to the last, in
its showing their perfect fellowship; and a single aim uniting
them under circumstances of various distress, trial, and pleasure.
Without the fellowship, no beauty; without the steady purpose,
no beauty; without trouble, and'death, no beauty; without indi-
vidual pleasvire, freedom, and caprice, so far as may be consistent
with the universal good, no beauty.

§ 18. Tree-loveliness might be thus lost or killed in many ways.
Discordance would kill it—of one leaf with another; disobedience
would kill it—of any leaf to the ruling law; indulgence would
kill it, and the doing away with pain ; or slavish symmetry would
kill it, and the doing away with delight. And this is so, down to the
smallest atom and beginning of life: so soon as there is life at all,
there are these four conditions of it;—harmony, obedience, distress,
and delightsome inequality. Here is the magnified
section of an oak-bud, not the size of a wheat grain
(Fig. 68). Already its nascent leaves are seen
arranged under the perfect law of resilience, i^repar-
ing for stoutest work on the right side. Here is
a dog-wood bud just opening into life (Fig. 69).
Its ruling law is to be four square, but see how the
uppermost leaf takes the lead, and the lower bends up, already

CHAP. VIII. THE LEAF M01^U3i^ENTS. 69

a little distressed by tlie effort. Here is a birch-bud, farther
advanced, Fig. 70. Who shall say how many humours the little
thing has in its mind already;
or how many adventures it has
passed through? And so to
the end. Help, submission,
sorrow, dissimilarity, are the
sources of all good ; — war,
disobedience, luxury, equality,
the som'ces of all evil.

There is yet another and
a deeply laid lesson to be re-
ceived from the leaf-builders,
which I hope the reader has

already perceived. Every leaf, we have seen, connects its work
with the entire and accumulated result of the work of its pre-

r8 THE LEAI^ MONUMENTS. tABT VI.

decessors. Tlieir pl-evloiis cbnstrtiction served it during its life,
raised it towards the liglit, gave it more free sway and motion
in the wind, and removed it from tlie noxiousness of earth
exhalation. Dying, it leaves its own small but well-labOUred
thread, adding, though imperceptibly, yet essentially, to the
strength, from root to crest, of the trunk on which it had lived,
and fitting that trunk for better service to succeeding races of
leaves.

We men, sometimes, in what we presume to be humility,
compare ourselves with leaves; but we have as yet no right to do
so. The leaves may well scorn the comparison. We, who live
for ourselves, and neither know how to use nor keep the work of
past time, may humbly learn,—as from the ant, foresight,—from
the leaf, reverence. The powder of every great people, as of every
living tree, depends on its not effacing, but confirming and
concluding, the labours of its ancestors. Looking back to the
history of nations, we may date the beginning of their decline
from the moment when they ceased to be reverent in heart, and
accumulative in hand and brain; from the moment when the
redundant fruit of age hid in them the hollowness of heart,
whence the simplicities of custom and sinews of tradition had
withered away. Had men but guarded the righteous laws, and
protected the precious works of their fathers, with half the industry
they have given to change and to ravage, they would not now
have been seeking vainly, in millennial visions and mechanic
servitudes, the accomplishment of the promise made to them so
long ago: "As the days of a tree are the days of my people,
and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands; they
shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are
the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their offspring with
them."

This lesson we have to take from the leaf's life. One more we
may receive from its death. If ever in autumn, a pensiveness
falls upon us as the leaves drift by in their fading, may we not
wisely look up in hope to their mighty monuments ? Behold hoAV
fair, how far prolonged, in arch and aisle, the avenues of the
valleys; the fringes of the hills So stately,—so eternal; the joy

i.

CHAP. VIII.

THE LEAF MOKUMENTS.

of man, the comfort of all living creatures, tlie glory of the earth,
—they are but the monuments of those poor leaves that flit faintly
past us to die. Let them not pass, without our understanding
their last counsel and example: that we also, careless of monument
by the grave, may build it in the world—monument by which men
may be taught to remember, not where we died, but where we
lived.

■8

I

80

CHAPTER IX.

THE LEAF SHADOWS.

§ 1. It may be judged, by the time wliicli it has taken to arrive at any
clear idea of tlie structure of shield-builders, what a task would
open to us if we endeavoured to trace the more wonderful forms of
the wild builders with the sword. Not that they are more complex;
but they are more definite, and cannot be so easily generalized.
The conditions which produce the spire of the cypress, and flaked
breadth of the cedar, the rounded head of the stone pine, and
perfect pyramid of the black spruce, are far more distinct, and
would require more accurate and curious diagrams to illustrate
them, than the graceful, but in some degree monotonous branching
of leaf-builders. In broad principle they are, however, alike. The
leaves construct the sprays in the same accumulative way: the
only essential difference being that in the sword-builders the leaves
are all set close, and at
equal intervals. Instead
of admitting extended
and variable spaces be-
tween them, the whole
spray is one tower of
leaf-roots, set in a per-
fect spiral. Thus, Fig.
71, at A, represents a
fragment of spray ' of ^
Scotch fir of its real size.
B is the same piece
magnified, the diamond-

>1'

rn^mmmmm^ .imMi. .-•LI-

CHAP. IX. THE LEAF SHADOWS. 81

like spaces being the points on which the leaves grew. The dotted
lines show the regularity of the spiral. As the minor stems join in
boughs, the scars left by the leaves are gradually effaced, and a
thick, but broken and scaly bark forms instead.

§ 2. A sword-builder may therefore be generally considered as a
shield-builder put under the severest military restraint. The
graceful and thin leaf is concentrated into a strong, narrow, pointed
rod; and the insertion of these rods on the stem is in a close and
perfectly timed order. In some ambiguous trees connected with
the tribe (as the arbor vitsB) there is no proper stem to the outer
leaves, but all the extremities form a kind of coralline leaf, flat and
fern-like, but articulated like a crustacean animal, which gradually
concentrates and embrowns itself into the stem. The thicker
branches of these trees are exquisitely fantastic; and the mode in
which the flat system of leaf first produces an irregular branch, and
then adapts itself to the symmetrical cone of the whole tree, is one of
the most interesting processes of form which I know in vegetation.

§ 3. Neither this, however, nor any other of the pine formations,
have we space here to examine in detail; while without detail, all
discussion of them is in vain. I shall only permit myself to note a
few points respecting my favourite tree, the black spruce, not with
any view to art criticism (though we might get at some curious
results by a comparison of popular pine-drawing in Germany,
America, and other dark-wooded countries, with the true natural
forms), but because I think the expression of this tree has not been
rightly understood by travellers in Switzerland, and that, with a
little watching of it, they might easily obtain a juster feeling.

§ 4. Of the many marked adaptations of nature to the mind of
man, it seems one of the most singular, that trees intended
especially for the adornment of the wildest mountains should be in
broad outline the most formal of trees. The vine, which is to be
the companion of man, is waywardly docile in its growth, falling
into festoons beside his cornfields, or roofing his garden-walks, or
casting its shadow all summer upon his door. Associated always
with the trimness of cultivation, it introduces all possible elements
of sweet wildness. The pine, placed nearly always among scenes
disordered and desolate, brings into them all possible elements of
TOL. T. G

82 TIIE LEAF SHADOWS. P.UIT VI.

order and precision. Lo\Yland trees may lean to tliis side and
that, though it is but a meadow breeze that bends them, or a bank
of cowslips from which their trunks lean aslope. But let storm and
avalanche do their worst, and let the pine find only a ledge of
vertical precipice to cling to, it will nevertheless grow straight.
Thrust a rod from its last shoot down the stem;—it shall point
to the centre of the earth as long as the tree lives.

§ 5. Also it may be well for lowland branches to reach hither and
thither for what they need, and to take all kinds of irregular shape
and extension. But the pine is trained to need nothing, and
to endure everything. It is resolvedly whole, self-contained,
desiring nothing but rightness, content with restricted completion.
Tall or short, it will be straight. Small or large, it will be round.
It may be permitted also to these soft lowland trees that they
should make themselves gay with show of blossom, and glad
with pretty charities of fruitfulncss. We builders with the sword
have harder work to do for man, and must do it in close-set troops.
To stay the sliding of the mountain snows, which would bury him;
to hold in divided drops, at our sword-points, the rain, which would
sweep away him and his treasure-fields; to nurse in shade among
our brown fallen leaves the tricklings that feed the brooks in
drought; to give massive shield against the winter wind, which
shrieks through the bare branches of the plain:—such service must
we do him stedfastly while we live. Our bodies, also, are at his
service: softer than the bodies of other trees, though our toil is
harder than theirs. Let him take them as pleases him, for his
houses and ships. So also it may be well for these timid lowland
trees to tremble with all their leaves, or turn their paleness to the
sky, if but a rush of rain passes by them; or to let fall their
leaves at last, sick and sere. But we pines must live carelessly
amidst the wrath of clouds. We only wave our branches to and
fro when the storm pleads with us, as men toss their arms in a
dream.

And finally, these weak lowland trees may struggle fondly
for the last remnants of life, and send up feeble saplings again
from their roots when they are cut down. But we builders with the
sword perish boldly; our dying shall be perfect and solemn, as

il:

lU

I

iiiiiiiiiili

mss

THE LEiii' SHADOWS.

our warring: we give up our lives without reluctance, and for
ever. ^

§ G. I wish the reader to fix his attention for a moment on these
two great characters of the pine, its straightness and rounded per-
fectness; both wonderful, and in their issue lovely, though they
have hitherto prevented the tree from being drawn. I say, first,
its straightness. Because we constantly see it in the wildest
scenery, we are apt to remember only as characteristic examples
of it those which have been disturbed by violent accident or
disease. Of course such instances are fifequent. ' The soil of the
pine is subject to continual change; perhaps the rock in which it
is rooted splits in frost and falls forward, throwing the young
stems aslope, or the whole mass of earth round it is undermined
by rain, or a huge boulder falls on its stem from above, and forces
it for twenty years to grow with weight of a couple of tons
leaning on its side. Hence, especially at edges of loose cliffs,
about waterfalls, or at glacier banks, and in other places liable to
disturbance, the pine may be seen distorted andobhque; and in
Turner's " Source'of the Arveron," he has, with his usual unerring
perception of the main point in any matter, fastened on this means
of relating the glacier's history. The glacier cannot explain its
own motion; and ordinary observers saw in it only its rigidity;
but Turner saw that the wonderful thing was its non-rigidity.
Other ice is fixed, only this ice stirs. All the banks are stag-
gering beneath its waves, crumbling and withered as by the blast
of a perpetual storm. He made the rocks of his foreground loose
—rolling and tottering down together; the pines smitten aside by
them, their tops dead, bared by the ice wind.

§ 7. Nevertheless, this is not the truest or universal expression of
the pine's character. I said long ago, even of Turner: " Into the
spirit of the pine he cannot enter." He understood the glacier at
once; he had seen the force of sea on shore too often to miss the
action of those crystal-crested waves. But the pine was strange to
him, adverse to his delight in broad and flowing line; he refused

' " Croesus, therefore, having heard these things, sent word to the people of Latni)-
sacus that they should lot Miltiadcs go ; aud, if not, he would cut them down like a
pine-tree,"—Herod, vi. 37.

02

its magnificent erectness. Magnificent!—nay, sometimes, almost
terrible. Other trees, tufting crag or liill, yield to tlie form and
sway of the gromid, clothe it with soft compliance, are partly its
subjects, partly its flatterers, partly its comforters. But the pine
rises in serene resistance, self-contained; nor can I ever without
awe stay long under a great Alpine cliff, far from all house or
work of men, looking up to its companies of pine, as they stand
on the inaccessible juts and perilous ledges of the enormous wall,
in quiet multitudes, each like the shadow of the one beside it—■
upright, fixed, spectral, as troops of ghosts standing on the walls
of Hades, not knowing each other—dumb for ever. You cannot
reach them, cannot cry to them;—those trees never heard human
voice; they are far above all sound but of the winds. No foot ever
stirred fallen leaf of theirs. All comfortless they stand, between the
two eternities of the Vacancy and the Rock: yet with such iron will,
that the rock itself looks bent and shattered beside them—fragile,
weak, inconsistent, compared to their dark energy of delicate life,
and monotony of enchanted pride:—unnumbered, unconquerable.

§ Then note, farther, their perfectness. The impression on most
people's minds must have been received more from pictures than
reality, so far as I can judge;—so ragged they think the pine;
whereas its chief character in health is green and full roundness.
It stands compact, like one of its own cones, slightly curved on
its sides, finished and quaint as a carved tree in some Elizabethan
garden; and instead of being wild in expression, forms the
softest of all forest scenery; for other trees show their trunks and
twisting boughs: but the pine, growing either in luxuriant mass or
in happy isolation, allows no branch to be seen. Summit behind
summit rise its pyramidal ranges, or down to the very grass sweep
the circlets of its boughs; so that there is nothing but green cone
and green carpet. Nor is it only softer, but in one sense more
cheerful than other foliage; for it casts only a pyramidal shadow.
Lowland forest arches overhead, and chequers the ground with
darkness; but the pine, growing in scattered groups, leaves the
glades between emerald-bright. Its gloom is all its own; narrow-
ing into the sky, it lets the sunshine strike down to the dew. And
if ever a superstitious feeling comes over me among the pine-

tiAiiiii

glades, it is never tainted with the old German forest fear; but is
only a more solemn tone of the fairy enchantment that haunts our
English meadows; so that I have always called the prettiest pine
glade in Chamouni, " Fairies' Hollow." It is in the glen beneath
the steep ascent above Pont Pelissier, and may be reached by a
little winding path which goes down from the top of the hill;
being, indeed, not truly a glen, but a broad ledge of moss and
turf, leaning in a formidable precipice (which, however, the gentle
branches hide) over the Arve. An almost isolated rock promon-
tory, many-coloured, rises at the end of it. On the other sides
it is bordered by cliffs, from which a little cascade falls, literally,
down among the pines, for it is so light, shaking itself into mere
showers of seed pearl in the sun, that the pines don't know it
from mist, and grow through it without minding. Underneath,
there is only the mossy silence, and above, for ever, the snow of
the nameless Aiguille.

§ 9. And then the third character which I want you to notice in
the pine is its exquisite fineness. Other trees rise against the sky
in dots and knots, but this in fringes.^ You never see the edges

^ Keats (as is his way) jrats nearly all that may be said of the pine into one verse,
though they are only figurative pines of which he is speaking. I have come to that
pass of admiration for him now, that I dare not read him, so discontented he makes
me with my own work : but others must not leave unread, in considei'ing the influence
of trees upon the human soul, that marvellous ode to Psyche. Here is the piece
about pines:—

" Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, now grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines, shall murmur in the wind :
Fai-, far around shall those dark-clustered trees
Fledge the wild-ridged mountains, steep by steep;
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
The moss-lain Dr}^ads shall be luU'd to sleep ;
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the weath'd trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name.
With all the Gardener Fancy e'er could feign.
Who, breeding flowers, will never breed the same.
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win;
A bright torch, and a casement ope, at night,
To let the warm Love in,"

86 TIIE LEAF SHADOWS. P.UIT VI.

of it, so subtle are they; and for this reason, it alone of trees, so
far as I know, is capaLIe of the fiery change which we saw before
had been noticed by Shakespere. When the sun rises behind a
ridge crested with pine, provided the ridge be at a distance of
about two miles, and seen clear, all the trees, for about three or
four degrees on each side of the sun, become trees of light, seen
in clear flame against the darker sky, and dazzling as the sun
itself. I thought at first this was owing to the actual lustre of
the leaves; but I believe now it is caused by the cloud-dew upon
them,—every minutest leaf carrying its diamond. It seems as if
tliese trees, living always among the clouds, had caught part of
their glory from them; and themselves the darkest of vegetation,
could yet add splendour to the sun itself.

§ 10- Yet I have been more struck by their character of finished
delicacy at a distance from the central Alps, among the pastoral
hills of the Emmenthal, or lowland districts of Berne, where they
are set in groups between the cottages, Avhose shingle roofs (they
also of pine) of deep gray blue, and lightly carved fronts, golden
and orange in the autumn sunshine,^ gleam on the banks and
lawns of hill-side,—endless lawns, mounded, and studded, and
bossed all over with deeper green hay-heaps, orderly set, like
jewellery (the mountain hay, when the pastures are full of springs,
being strangely dark and fresh in verdure for a whole day after it
is cut). And amidst this delicate delight of cottage and field, the
young pines stand delicatest of all, scented as with frankincense,
their slender stems straight as arrows, and crystal white, looking
as if they would break with a touch, like needles ; and their
arabesques of dark leaf pierced through and through by the pale
radiance of clear sky, opal blue, where they follow each other
along the soft hill-ridges, up and down.

§ 11. I have watched them in such scenes with the deeper interest,
because of all trees they have hitherto had most influence on
human character. The effect of other vegetation, however great,
has been divided by mingled species; elm and oak in England,

* There has been much cottagc-building about the hills lately, with very pretty
carving, the skill in Avhich has been encouraged by travellers ; and the frcsh-cut larcli
is splendid in colour imder rosy sunlight.

CHAP. IX. THE LEAF SHADOWS. 87

poplar in France, birch in Scotland, olive in Italy and Spain, share
their power with inferior trees, and with all the changing charm of
successive agriculture. But the tremendous unity of the pine
absorbs and moulds the life of a race. The pine shadows rest
upon a nation. The Northern peoples, century after century,
lived under one or other of the two great powers of the Pine
and the Sea, both infinite. They dwelt amidst the forests, as they
wandered on the waves, and saw no end, nor any other horizon;—
still the dark green trees, or the dark green waters, jagged the
dawn with their fringe, or their foam. And whatever elements
of imagination, or of warrior strength, or of domestic justice,
were brought down by the Norwegian and the Goth against the
dissoluteness or degradation of the South of Europe, were taught
them under the green roofs and wild penetralia of the pine.

§ 12. I do not attempt, delightful as the task would be, to trace
this influence (mixed Avith superstition) in Scandinavia, or North
Germany; but let us at least note it in the instance which wo
speak of so freq^uently, yet so seldom take to heart. There has
been much dispute respecting the character of the Swiss, arising
out of the difficulty which other nations had to understand their
simplicity. They ■were assumed to be either romantically virtuous,
or basely mercenary, when in fact they were neither heroic nor base,
but were true-hearted men, stubborn with more than any recorded
stubbornness ; not much regarding their lives, yet not casting them
causelessly away; forming no high ideal of improvement, but
never relaxing their grasp of a good they had once gained; devoid
of all romantic sentiment, yet loving with a practical and patient
love that neither wearied nor forsook; little given to enthusiasm in
religion, but maintaining their faith in a purity which lio world-
liness deadened and no hypocrisy soiled; neither chivalrously
generous nor pathetically humane, yet never pursuing their
defeated enemies, nor sulFering their poor to perish; proud, yet
not allowing their pride to prick them into unwary or unworthy
quarrel; avaricious, yet contentedly rendering to their neighbour
his due; dull, but clear-sighted to all the principles of justice; and
patient, without ever allowing delay to be prolonged by sloth, or
forbearance by fear.

88

THE LEAF SHADOWS.

§ 13. This temper of Swiss mind, while it animated the whole con-
federacy, was rooted chiefly in one small district which formed the
heart of their country, yet lay not among its highest mountains.
Beneath the glaciers of Zermatt and Evolena, and on the scorching
slopes of the Valais, the peasants remained in an aimless torpor,
unheard of hut as the obedient vassals of the great Bishopric of
Sion. But Avhere the lower ledges of calcareous rock were
broken by the inlets of the Lake Lucerne, and bracing winds
penetrating from the north forbade the growth of the vine,
compelling the peasantry to adopt an entirely pastoral life, was
reared another race of men. Their narrow domain should be
marked by a small green spot on every map of Europe. It is about
forty miles from east to west; as many from north to south: yet on
that shred of rugged ground, while every kingdom of the world
around it rose or fell in fatal change, and every multitudinous
race mingled or wasted itself in various dispersion and decline,
the simple shepherd dynasty remained changeless. There is no
record of their origin. They are neither Goths, Burgundians,
Eomans, nor Germans. They have been for ever Helvetii, and for
ever free. Voluntarily placing themselves under the protection of
the House of Hapsburg, they acknowledged its supremacy, but
resisted its oppression; and rose against the unjust governors it
appointed over them, not to gain, but to redeem, their liberties.
Victorious in the struggle by the Lake of Egeri, they stood the
foremost standard-bearers among the nations of Europe in the
cause of loyalty and life—^loyalty in its highest sense, to the laws
of God's helpful justice, and of man's faithful and brotherly
fortitude.

§ 14. You will find among them, as I said, no subtle wit nor high
enthusiasm, only an undeceivable common sense, and an obstinate
rectitude. They cannot be persuaded into their duties, but they
feel them; they use no phrases of friendship, but do not fail you
at your need. Questions of creed, which other nations sought to
solve by logic or reverie, these shepherds brought to practical tests;
sustained with tranquillity the excommunication of abbots who
wanted to feed their cattle on other people's fields, and, halbert
in hand, struck down the Swiss Reformation^ because the Evan-

CHAP. IX. THE LEAF SHADOWS.

89

gellcals of Zuricb refused to send them their due supplies of salt.
Not readily yielding to the demands of superstition, they were
patient under those of economy; they would purchase the remis-
sion of taxes, but not of sins; and while the sale of indulgences
was arrested in the church of Ensiedlen as boldly as at the gates of
Wittenberg, the inhabitants of the valley of Frutigen^ ate no
meat for seven years, in order peacefully to free themselves and
their descendants from the seigniorial claims of the Baron of
Thurm.

§ 15. What praise may be justly due to this modest and rational
virtue, we have perhaps no sufficient grounds for defining. It
must long remain questionable how far the vices of superior civili-
zation may be atoned for by its achievements, and the errors of
more transcendental devotion forgiven to its rapture. But, take it
for what we may, the character of this peasantry is, at least,
serviceable to others and sufficient for their own peace; and in
its consistency and simplicity, it stands alone in the history of the
hmnan heart. How far it was developed by circumstances of
natural phenomena may also be disputed; nor should I enter into
such dispute with any strongly held conviction. The Swiss have
certainly no feelings respecting their mountains in anywise corre-
spondent to ours. It was rather as fortresses of defence, than as
spectacles of splendour, that the cliffs of the Rothstock bare rule
over the destinies of those who dwelt at their feet; and the training
for which the mountain children had to thank the slopes of the
Muotta-Thal, was in soundness of breath, and steadiness of limb,
far more than in elevation of idea. But the point which I desire
the reader to note is, that the character of the scene which, if any,
appears to have been impressive to the inhabitant, is not that
which we ourselves feel when we enter the district. It was not
from tlieir lakes, nor their cliffs, nor their glaciers—though these
were all peculiarly their possession, that the three venerable
cantons or states received their name. They were not called the
States of the Rock, nor the States of the Lake, but the States of

' This valley is on the pass of the Gemmi in Canton Berne, but the people are the
same in temper as those of the Waldstetten.

90 TIIE LEAF SHADOWS. P.UIT VI.

the Forest. And tlio one of the three which contains the most
touching record of tlie spiritual power of Swiss religion, in the
name of the convent of the "Hill of Angels," has, for its own,
none but the sweet childish name of " Under the Woods."

§ 16. And indeed you may pass under them if, leaving the most
sacred spot in Swiss history, the MeadoAv of the Three Foun-
tains, you bid the boatman row southward a little way by the
shore of the Bay of XJri. Steepest there on its western side, the
walls of its rocks ascend to heaven. Far in the blue of evening,
like a great cathedral pavement, lies the lake in its darkness; and
you may hear the whisper of innumerable falling waters return
from the hollows of the cliff, like the voices of a multitude praying
under their breath. From time to time the beat of a wave, slow
lifted, where the rocks lean over the black depth, dies heavily as the
last note of a requiem. Opposite, green with steep grass, and set
with chalet villages, the Frou-Alp j-ises in one solemn glow of
pastoral light and peace; and above, against the clouds of twilight,
ghostly on the gray precipice, stand, myriad by myriad, the shadowy
armies of the Unterwalden pine.^

I have seen that it is possible for the stranger to pass through
this great chapel, with its font of waters, and mountain pillars, and
vaults of cloud,, without being touched by one noble thought, or
stirred by any sacred passion; but for those who received from
its waves the baptism of their youth, and learned beneath its rocks
the fidelity of their manhood, and watched amidst its clouds the
likeness of the dream of life, with the eyes of age—for these I will
not believe that the mountain shrine was built, cr the calm of its
forest-shadows guarded by their God, in vain.

1 The cliff immediately bordering tlie lake is in Canton Uri; the green hills of
Untenvalden rise above. This is the grandest piece of the shore of Lake Lucerne;
the rocks near Toll's Chapel are neither so lofty nor so precipitous.

; /

91

CPIAPTER X.

LEAVES MOTIONLESS.

§ 1. It will be remembered tliat our final inq^uiry was to bo into the
sources of beauty in the tented plants, or flowers of the field; which
the reader may perhaps suppose one of no great difficulty, the
beauty of flowers being somewhat generally admitted and com-
prehended.

Admitted ? yes. Comprehended ? no; and, which is worse, in
all its highest characters, for many a day yet, incomprehensible:
though with a little steady application, I suppose we might soon
know more than we do now about the colours of floAvers,—being
tangible enough, and staying longer than those of clouds. We
have discovered something definite about colours of opal and of
peacock's plume; perhaps, also, in due time we may give some
account of that true gold (the only gold of intrinsic value) which
gilds buttercups; and understand how the spots are laid, in painting
a pansy.

Art of interest, when we may win any of its secrets; but to
such knowledge the road lies not up brick streets. And hoAVSoever
that flower-painting may be done, one thing is certain, it is not by
machinery.

§ 2. Perhaps, it may be thought, if Ave understood flowers better,
Ave might love them less.

We do not love them much, as it is. Few people care about
floAvers. Many, indeed, are fond of finding a new shape of blos-
som, caring for it as a child cares about a kaleidoscope. Many,
also, like a fair service of flowers in the greenhouse, as a fair
service of plate on the table. Many are scientifically interested

92

LEAVES MOTIONLESS.

in tliem, though even these in the nomenclature rather than the
flowers. And a few enjoy their gardens: but I have never heard
of a piece of land, which would let well on a building lease,
remaining unlet because it was a flowery piece. I have never
heard of parks being kept for wild hyacinths, though often of their
being kept for wild beasts. And the blossoming time of the
year being principally spring, I perceive it to be the mind of most
people, during that period, to stay in towns.

§ 3. A year or two ago, a keen-sighted and eccentrically-minded
friend of mine, having taken it into his head to violate this national
custom, and go to the Tyrol in spring, was passing through a
valley near Landech, with several similarly headstrong companions.
A strange mountain appeared in the distance, belted about its
breast with a zone of blue, like our English Queen. Was it
a blue cloud ? A blue horizontal bar of the air that Titian breathed
in youth, seen now far away, which mortal might never breathe
again? Was it a mirage—a meteor? Would it stay to be
approached? (ten miles of winding road yet between them and
the foot of its mountain.) Such questioning had they con-
cerning it. My keen-sighted friend alone maintained it to be
substantial; whatever it might be, it was not air, and would
not vanish. The ten miles of road were overpassed, the carriage
left, the mountain climbed. It stayed patiently, expanding still into
richer breadth and heavenlier glow—a belt of gentians. Such tilings
may verily be seen among the Alps in spring, and in spring only.
Which being so, I observe most people prefer going in autumn.

§ 4. Nevertheless, without any special affection for them, most of us,
at least, languidly consent to the beauty of flowers, and occasionally
gather them, and prefer them from among other forms of vegeta-
tion. This, strange to say, is precisely what great painters do not.

Every other kind of object they paint, in its due place and
office, with respect;—but, except compulsorily and imperfectly,
never flowers. A curious fact, this! Here are men whose lives
are spent in the study of colour, and the one thing they will not
paint is a flower! Anything but that. A furred mantle, a jewelled
zone, a silken gown, a brazen corslet, nay, an old leathern chair,
or a wall-paper if you will, with utmost care and delight;—

CIUP. X. LEAVES MOTIONLESS. 93

"^pl

but a flower by no manner of means^ if avoidable. When tlie tiling
has perforce to be done^ the great painters of course do it rightly.
Titian, in his early work, sometimes carries a blossom or two
out with affection, as the columbines in our Bacchus and Ariadne,
So also Holbein. But in his later and mightier work, Titian
will only paint a fan or a wristband intensely, never a flower. In
his portrait of Lavinia, at Berlin, the roses are just touched finely
enough to fill their place, with no affection whatever, and with the
most subdued red possible; while in the later portrait of her, at
Dresden, there are no roses at all, but a belt of chased golden
balls, on every stud of vsihicli Titian has concentrated his strength,
and I verily believe forgot the face a little, so much has his mind
been set on them.

§ 5. In Paul Veronese's Europa, at Dresden, the entire foreground
is covered with flowers, but thej are executed with sharp and
crude touches hke those of a decorative painter. In Correggio's
paintings, at Dresden, and in the Antiope of the Louvre, thercs
are lovely pieces of foliage, but no flowers. A large garland of
oranges and lemons, with their leaves, above the St. George, at
Dresden, is connected traditionally with the garlanded backgrounds
of Ghirlandajo and Mantegna, but the studious absence of flowers
renders it almost disagreeably ponderous. I do not remember any
painted by Yelasquez, or by Tintoret, except compulsory Annun-
ciation lilies. The flowers of Rubens are gross and rude; those of
Vandyck vague, slight, and subdued in colour, so as not to con-
tend with the flesh. In his portraits of King Charles's children,
at Turin, an enchanting picture, there is a rose-thicket, in which
the roses seem to be enchanted the wrong way, for their leaves arc
all gray, and the flowers dull brick-red. Yet it is right.

§ 6. One reason for this is that all great men like their inferior
forms to follow and obey contours of large surfaces, or group
themselves in connected masses. Patterns do the first, leaves the
last; but flowers stand separately.

Another reason is that the beauty of flower-petals and texture
can only be seen by looking at it close; but flat patterns can
be seen far off, as well as gleaming of metal-work. All the great
men calculate their work for effect at some distance, and with that

94 LEAVES MOTIONLESS. part n.

object^ know it to be lost time to complete the drawing of flowers.
Farther, the forms of flowers being determined, require a painful
attention, and restrain the fancy; whereas, in painting fur, jewels,
or bronze, the colour and touch may be varied almost at pleasure,
and without effort.

Again, much of what is best in flowers is inimitable in paint-
ing; and a thoroughly good workman feels the feebleness of his
means when he matches them fairly with Nature, and gives up
the attempt frankly—painting the rose dull^red, rather than trying
to rival its flush in sunshine.

And, lastly, in nearly all good lands(;ape-painting, the breadtli
of foreground included implies such a distance of the spectator
from the nearest object as must entirely prevent his seeing flower
detail.

p § 7. There is, however, a deeper reason than all these; namely, that

flowers have no sublimitv. Wc shall have to examine the nature
of sublimity in our following and last section, among other ideas
of relation. Here I only note the fact briefly, that impressions of
awe and sorrow being at the root of the sensation of sublimity,
and the beauty of separate flowers not being of the kind which
connects itself with such sensation, there is a wide distinction,
in general, between flower-loving minds and minds of the highest
order. Tlowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity:
children love them; quiet, tender, contented ordinary people love
them as they grow; luxurious and disorderly people rejoice in
|l them gathered: They arc the cottager's treasure; and in the

crowded town, mark, as with a little broken fragment of rainbow,
the windows of the workers in whose heart rests the covenant
of peace. Passionate or religious minds contemplate them with
fond, feverish intensity; the affection is seen severely calm in the
works of many old religious painters, and mixed with more open
and true country sentiment in those of our own pre-Raphaelites.
To the child and the girl, the peasant and the j manufacturing
operative, to the grisette and the nun, the lover and monk, they are
precious always. But to the men of supremo power and thought-
fulness, precious only at times; symbolically and pathetically
often to the poets, but rarely for their own sake. They fall

CIUP. X. LEAVES MOTIONLESS. 95

forgotten from the great workmen's and soldiers' hands. Such
men will take, in thankfulness, crowns of leaves, or crowns of
thorns—not crowns of flowers.

§ 8. Some beautiful tilings have been done lately, and more beau-
tiful are likely to be done, by our younger painters, in representing
blossoms of the orchard and the field in mass and extent. I have
had something to do with the encouragement of this impulse; and
truly, if pictures are to be essentially imitative rather than in-
ventive, it is better to spend care in painting hyacinths than dead
leaves, and roses rather than stubble. Such work, however, as I
stated in my first essay on this subject, in the year 1851,^ can
only connect itself with the great schools by becoming inventive
instead of copyist; and for the most part, I believe these young
painters would do well to remember that the best beauty of flowers
being wholly inimitable, and their sweetest service unrenderable
by art, the picture involves some approach to an unsatisfying
mockery, in the cold imagery of what Nature has given to be
breathed with the profuse winds of spring, and touched by the
happy footsteps of youth.

§ 9. Among the greater masters, as I have said, there is little
laborious or afiectionate flower-painting. The utmost that Turner
ever allows in his foregrounds is a water-lily or two, a cluster of
heath or foxglove, a thistle sometimes, a violet or daisy, or a
bindweed-bell; just enough to lead the eye into the understanding
of the rich mystery of his more distant leafage. Rich mystery,
indeed, respecting which these following facts about the foliage of
tented plants must be noted carefully.

§ 10. Two characters seem especially aimed at by Nature in the earth-
plants : first, that they should be characteristic and interesting;
secondly, that they should not be very visibly injured by crushing.

I say, first, characteristic. The leaves of large trees take
approximately simple forms, slightly monotonous. They are in-
tended to be seen in mass. But the leaves of the herbage at our
feet take all kinds of strange shapes, as if to invite us to examine

1 Pre-Eaphaeliiism : p. 28, and the note at p. 27; comparcp. 63, The essay con-
tains some important notes on Turner's work, which, therefore, I do not repeat in this
volmne.

96

"P

LEAVES MOTIONLESS.

them. Star-sliaped, heart-shaped, spear-shaped, arrow-shaped,
fretted, fringed, cleft, furrowed, serrated, sinuated; in whorls, in
tufts, in spires, in wreaths, endlessly expressive, deceptive, fan-
tastic, never the same from footstalk to blossom; they seem
perpetually to tempt our watchfulness, and take delight in out-
stripping our wonder.

Secondly, observe, their forms are such as will not be visibly
injured by crushing. Their complexity is already disordered:
jags and rents are their laws of being; rent by the footstep, tliey
betray no harm. Here, for instance (Fig. 72), is the mere outline

A

of a buttercup-leaf in full free growth; which, perhaps, may be
taken as a good common type of earth foliage. Fig. 73 is a less
advanced one, placed so as to show its symmetrical bounding form.
But both, how varioushow delicately rent into beauty! As in

bi

jf'i

CIUP. X. LEAVES MOTIONLESS. 1681

ymm

97

the aiguilles of the great Alps, so in this lowest field-herb, where
rending is the law of being, it is the law of loveliness.

§ 12. One class, however, of these torn leaves, peculiar to the tented
plants, has, it seems to me, a strange expressional function. I mean
the group of leaves rent into alternate gaps, typically represented
by the thistle. The alternation of the rent, if not absolutely, is,

effectively, peculiar to the earth-plants. Leaves of the builders
are rent symmetrically, so as to form radiating groups, as in the
horse-chestnut, or they are irregularly sinuous, as in the oak; but
the earth-plants continually present forms such as those in the
opposite Plate: a kind of web-footed leaf, so to speak; a continuous
tissue, enlarged alternately on each side of the stalk. Leaves of
this form have necessarily a kind of limping gait, as if they grew
not all at once, but first a little bit on one side, and then a little
bit on the other, and wherever they occur in quantity, give the
expression to foreground vegetation which we feel and call
" ragged."

It is strange that the mere alternation of the rent should give
this effect; the more so, because alternate leaves, completely sepa-
rate from each other, produce one of the most graceful types of

tol. v.

98 LEAVES MOTIONLESS. tart vi.

building plants. Yet the fact is indeed so, tliat tlie alternate rent
in the earth-leaf is the principal cause of its ragged e{Fect. How-
ever deeply it may he rent symraetrically, as in the alchemilla, or
buttercup, just instanced, and however finely divided, as in the
parsleys, the result is always a delicate richness, unless the jags
are alternate, and the leaf-tissue continuous at the stem; and the
moment these conditions appear, so does the raggedness.
§ 14. It is yet more worthy of note that the proper duty of these
leaves, Avhich catch the eye so clearly and powerfully, would
appear to be to draw the attention of man to spots v^'here his work
is needed, for they nearly all habitually grow on ruins or neglected
I ground: not noble rtiins, or on loild ground, but on heaps of

i rubbish, or pieces of land which have been indolently cultivated or

I much disturbed. The leaf on the right of the three in the Plate,

ft which is the most characteristic of the class, is that of the Sisym-

' brium Irio, which grows, by choice, always on ruins left by fire.

" The plant, which, as far as I have observed, grows first on earth

that has been moved, is the coltsfoot: its broad covering leaf
I is much jagged, but only irregular, not alternate in the rent; but

the weeds that mark habitual neglect, such as the thistle, give
§. clear alternation.

§ 15. The aspects of complexity and carelessness of injury are
farther increased in the herb of the field, because it is "herb
yielding seed;" that is to say, a seed different in character from
that which trees form in their fruit.

I am somewhat alarmed in reading over the above sentence,
lest a botanist, or other scientific person, should open the book at
it. For of course the essential .character of either fruit or seed
being only that in the smallest compass the vital principle of the
plant is rendered portable, and for some time, preservable, we
ought to call every such vegetable dormitory a "fruit" or a "seed"
indifferently. But with respect to man there is a notable difference
between them.

A seed is what we "sow."
A fruit, what we " enjoy."

Fruit is seed prepared especially for the sight and taste of mai^
and animals; and in this sense we have true fruit and traitorous

M

CIUP. X. LEAVES MOTIONLESS. 99

fruit (poisonous) ; but it is perhaps the best available distinction,^
that, seed being the part necessary for the renewed birth of the plant,
a fruit is such seed enclosed or sustained by some extraneous
substance, which is soft, and juicy, and beautifully coloured, pleasing
and useful to animals and men.

§ 16. I find it convenient in this volume, and wish I had thought of
the expedient before, whenever I get into a difficulty, to leave the
reader to work it out. He will perhaps, therefore, be so good as
to define fruit for himself. Having defined it, he will find that the
sentence about which I was alarmed above is, in the main, true, and
that tented plants principally are herb yielding seed, while build-
ing plants give fruit. The berried shrubs of rock and wood,
however dwarfed in stature, are true builders. The strawberry-
plant is the only important exception—a tender Bedouin.

§ 17. Of course the principal reason for this is the plain, practical one,
that fruit should not be trampled on, and had better perhaps be
put a little out of easy reach than too near the hand, so that it may
not be gathered wantonly or without some little trouble, and may
be waited for until it is properly ripe: while the plants meant to
be trampled on have small and multitudinous seed, hard and
wooden, which may be shaken and scattered about without harm.

Also, fine fruit is often only to be brought forth with patience:
not by young and hurried trees—but in due time, after much suf-
fering ; and the best fruit is often to be an adornment of old age,
so as to supply the want of other grace. While the plants which
will not work, but only bloom and wander, do not (except the
grasses) bring forth fruit of high service, but only the seed that
prolongs their race, the grasses alone having great honour put on
them for their humility, as we saw in our first account of them.

' I say the "beet available distinction." It is, of course, no real distinction. A pea-
pod is a kind of central tyj^e of seed and seed-vessel, and it is difficult so to define fniit
as to keep clear of it. Pea-shells are boiled and eaten in some countries rather than
pease. It does not sound like a scientific distinction to say that ft-uit is a " shell which
is good without being boiled." Nay, even if we humiliate ourselves into this practical
reference to the kitchen, we are still far from success. For the pulp of a strawbeny is
not a " shell," the seeds being on the outside of it. The available ]mrt of a pome-
granate or orange, though a seed envelope, is itself shut within a less usefiil rind.
While in an ahnond the shell becomes less profitable still, and all goodness retires into tho
seed itself, as in a gi-ain of com.

H 2

100 LEAVES MOTIONLESS. PART vr.

§ 18. This being so, we find another element of very complex effect
added to the others which exist in tented plants, namely, that of
minute, granular, feathery, or downy seed-vessels, mingling quaint
brown punctuation, and dusty tremors of dancing grain, with the
bloom of the nearer fields ; and casting a gossamered grayness and
softness of j)lumy mist alon^ their surfaces far away ; mysterious
evermore, not only with dew in the morning or mirage at noon,
but with the shaking threads of fine arborescence, each a little
belfry of grain-bells, all a-chime.

§ 19. I feel sorely tempted to draw one of these same spires of the
fine grasses, with its sweet changing proportions of pendent grain,
but it would be a useless piece of finesse, as such form of course
never enters into general foreground effect/ I have, however,
engraved, at the top of the group of woodcuts opposite (Fig. 74), a
single leaf cluster of Durer's foreground in the St. Hubert, which
is interesting in several ways; as an example of modern work, no
less than old; for it is a facsimile twice removed; being first drawn
from the plate with the pen, by Mr. Allen,' and then facsimiled on
wood by Miss Byfield; and if the reader can compare it with the
original, he will find it still come tolerably close in most parts
(though the nearest large leaf has got spoiled), and of course some
of the finest and most precious qualities of Durer's work are lost.
Still, it gives a fair idea of his perfectness of conception, every leaf
being thoroughly set in perspective, and drawn with unerring
decision. On each side of it (Figs. 75, 76,) are two pieces from
a fairly good modern etching, which I oppose to the Darer in
order to show the differe^ice between true work and that which
pretends to give detail, but is without feeling^or knowledge. There
are a great many leaves in the piece on the left, but they are all
set the same way; the draughtsman has not conceived their real

' For the same reason, I enter into no considerations respecting the geometrical
Ibi-ms of flowers, thoxigh they are tleeply interesting, and perhaps some day I may give
a few studies of them separately.^ The reader should note, however, that beauty of
fonn in flowers is chiefly dependent on a more accurately finished or more studiously
A'aried development of the tre-foil, quatre-foil, and cinq-foil stmctures which we have
seen irregularly approached by leaf-buds. The most beautiful six-foiled flowers (like
the rhododendron-shoot) are composed of two triangular grou})s, one superimposed on
the other, as in the narcissus; and the most interesting types both of six-foils and
cinq-foils are unequally leaved, symmetrical on opposite sides, as the iris and violet.

CIUP. X. LEAVES MOTIONLESS. 101

positions, but draws one after another as he would deliver a tale
of bricks. The grasses on the right look delicate, but are a mere
series of inorganic lines. Look how Durer's grass-blades cross each
other. If you take a pen and copy a little piece of each example,
you will soon feel the dilference. Underneath, in the centre
(Fig. 77), is a piece of grass out of Landseer's etching of the
'^Ladies' Pets," more massive and effective than the two lateral
fragments, but still loose and uncomposed. Then underneath is a
piece of firm and good work again, which will stand with Durer's;
it is the outline only of a group of leaves out of Turner's fore-
ground in the Richmond from the Moors, of which I give a reduced
etching, Plate 61, for the sake of the foreground principally, and in
Plate 62, the group of leaves in question, in their light and shade,
with the bridge beyond. What I have chiefly to say of them
belongs to our section on composition; but this mere fragment of a
Turner foreground may perhaps lead the reader to take note in
his great pictures of the almost inconceivable labour with which
he has sought to express the redundance and delicacy of ground
leafage.

§ 20. By comparing the etching in Plate 61 with the published
engraving, it will be seen how much yet remains to be done before
any approximately just representation of Turner foreground can
be put within the reach of the public. This Plate has been
reduced by Mr. Armytage from a pen-drawing of mine, as large
as the original of Turner's (18 inches by 11 inches). It will look
a little better under a magnifying glass; but only a most costly
engraving, of the real size, could give any idea of the richness of
mossy and ferny leafage included in the real design. And if this
be so on one of the ordinary England drawings of a barren
Yorkshire moor, it may be imagined what the task would be of
engraving truly such a foreground as that of the " Bay of Baias"
or "Daphne and Leucippus," in which Turner's aim has been
luxuriance.

§ 21, His mind recurred. In all these classical foregrounds, to strong
impressions made upon him during his studies at Rome, by the
masses of vegetation which enrich its heaps of ruin with their
embroidery and bloom. I have always partly regretted these

102

LEAVES MOTIONLESS.

Roman studies^ thinking tliat they led him into too great fondness
of wandering hixuriance in vegetation, associated with decay;
and prevented his giving affection enough to the more solemn
and more sacred infinity with which, among the mightier ruins
of the Alpine Rome, glow the pure and motionless splendours
of the gentian and the rose.

§ 22. Leaves motionless. The strong pines wave above them, and
the weak grasses tremble beside them; but the blue stars rest
upon the earth with a peace as of heaven; and far along the ridges
of iron rock, moveless as they, the rubied crests of Alpine rose
flush in the low rays of morning. Nor these yet the stillest
leaves. Others there are subdued to a deeper quietness, the
mute slaves of the earth, to whom we owe, perhaps, thanks, and
tenderness, the most profound of all we have to render for the
leaf ministries.

§ 23, It is strange to think of the gradually diminished power and
withdrawn freedom among the orders of leaves—from the sweep
of the chestnut and gadding of the vine, down to the close shrinking
trefoil, and contented daisy, pressed on earth; and, at last, to
the leaves that are not merely close to earth, but themselves a
part of it; fastened down to it by their sides, here and there
•only a wrinkled edge rising from the granite crystals. We have
found beauty in the tree yielding fruit, and in the herb yielding
seed. How of the herb yielding no sced,^ the fruitless, flowerless
lichen of the rock ?

§ 24. Lichen, and mosses (though these last in their luxuriance are
deep and rich as herbage, yet both for the most part humblest
of the green things that live),—how of these ? Meek creatures!
the first mercy of the earth, veiling with hushed softness its
dintless rocks; creatures full of pity, covering v/ith strange and
tender honour the scarred disgrace of ruin,—laying quiet finger
on the trembling stones, to teach them rest. No words, that I
know of, will say what these mosses are. None are delicate enough,
none perfect enough, none rich enough. How is one to tell of the

' The reader must remember always that my work is conccniing the aspects of
things only. Of com-se, a lichen has seeds, just as other plants have, but not eifeetually
or visibly for man.

CHAP. X. LEAVES LIOTIONLESS.

103

rounded bosses of furred and beaming green,—the starred divi-
sions of rubied bloom, fine-filmed, as if the Rock Spirits could spin
porphyry as we do glass,—the traceries of intricate silver, and
fringes of amber, lustrous, arborescent, burnished through every
fibre into fitful brightness and glossy traverses of silken change,
yet all subdued and pensive, and framed for simplest, sweetest
offices of grace. They will not be gathered, like the flowers, for
chaplet or love-token; but of these the wild bird will make its
nest, and the wearied child his pillow.

And, as the earth's first mercy, so they are its last gift to us.
When all other service is vain, from plant and tree, the soft
mosses and gray lichen take up their watch by the head-stone.
The woods, the blossoms, the gift-bearing grasses, have done their
parts for a time, but these do service for ever. Trees for the
builder's yard, flowers for the bride's chamber, corn for the
granary, moss for the grave.

Yet as in one sense the humblest, in another they are the
most honoured of the earth-children. Unfading, as motionless,
the worm frets them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in
lowliness, they neither blanch in heat nor pine in frost. To them,
slow-fingered, constant-hearted, is entrusted the weaving of the
dark, eternal, tapestries of the hills; to them, slow-pencilled, iris-
dyed, the tender framing of their endless imagery. Sharing the
stillness of the miimpassioned rock, they share also its endurance;
and while the winds of departing spring scatter the white haw-
thorn blossom like drifted snow, and summer dims on the parched
meadow the drooping of its cowslip-gold,—far above, among the
mountains, the silver lichen-spots rest, star-like, on the stone; and
the gathering orange stain upon the edge of yonder western peak
reflects the sunsets of a thousand years.

PAET YII.

OF OLOUD BEAU IT.

-*o*

CHAPTER L

THE CLOUD-BALANCINGS.

§ I- We have seen that -when the earth had to be prepared for the
habitation of man, a veil, as it were, of intermediate being was
spread between him and its darkness, in which were joined, in a
subdued measure, the stability and insensibility of the earth, and
the passion and perishing of mankind.

But the heavens, also, had to be prepared for his habitation.

Between their burning light,—their deep vacuity, and man,
as between the earth's gloom of iron substance, and man, a veil
had to be spread of intermediate being;—which should appease
the unendurable glory to the level of human feebleness, and
sign the changeless motion of the heavens with a semblance of
human vicissitude.

Between the earth and man arose the leaf. Between tho
heaven and man came the cloud. His life being partly as the
falling leaf, and partly as the flying vapour.

§ 2. Has the reader any distinct idea of what clouds are ? We had
some talk about them long ago, and perhaps thought their nature,
though at that time not clear to us, would be easily enough under-
standable when we put ourselves seriously to make it out. Shall
we begin with one or two easiest questions ?

106

mm

THE CLOUD-BALANCINGS,

That mist which lies in the morning so softly in the valley,
level and white, through which the tops of the trees rise as if
through an inundation—why is it so heavy ? and why does it lie
so low, being yet so thin and frail that it will melt away utterly
into splendour of morning, when the sun has shone on it hut a
few moments more. Those colossal pyramids, huge and firm,
with outlines as of rocks, and strength to bear the beating of the
high sun full on their fiery flanks—why are tJmj so light,—their
bases high over our heads, high over- the heads of Alps ? why
will these melt away, not as the sun rises, but as he descends, and
leave the stars of twilight clear, while the valley vapour gains
again upon the earth like a shroud ?

Or that ghost of a cloud, which steals by yonder clump of
pines: nay, which does not steal by them, but haunts them,
wreathing yet round them, and yet—and yet, slowly : now falling
in a fair waved line like a woman's veil; now fading, now gone:
we look away for an instant, and look back, and it is again there.
What has it to do with that clump of pines, that it broods by them
and weaves itself among their branches, to and fro ? Has it hidden
a cloudy treasure among the moss at their roots, which it watches
thus ? Or has some strong enchanter charmed it into fond return-
ing, or bound it fast within those bars of bough ? And yonder filmy
crescent, bent like an archer's bow above the snowy summit, the
highest of all the hill,—that white arch which never forms but over
the supreme crest,—how is it stayed there, repelled apparently from
the snow—nowhere touching it, the clear sky seen between it and
the momitain edge, yet never leaving it—poised as a white bird
hovers over its nest ?

Or those war-clouds that gather on the horizon, dragon-
crested, tongued with fire;—how is their barbed strength bridled ?
what bits are these they are champing with their vaporous lips;
flinging ofi* flakes of black foam ? Leagued leviathans of the Sea ot
Heaven, out of their nostrils goeth smoke, and their eyes are like
the eyelids of the morning. The sword of him that layeth at them
cannot hold the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon. Where ride
the captains of their armies? Where arc set the measures of their
march ? Fierce murmurers, answering each other from morning

^.v

----- « ---«—w^

ciiAiM. THE CLOUD-BALANCINGS. 107

until evening—what rebuke is this which has awed them into peace?
what hand has reined them back by the way by which they came?

§ 3. I know not if the reader will think at first that questions like
these are easily answered. So far from it, I rather believe that
some of the mysteries of the clouds never will be understood by
us at all. "Knowest thoa the balancings of the clouds?" Is the
answer ever to be one of pride ? " The wondrous works of Him
which is perfect in knowledge?" Is our knowledge ever to be so?

It is one of the most discouraging consequences of the varied
character of this work of mine, that I am wholly unable to take
note of the advance of modern science. What has conclusively
been discovered or observed about clouds, I know not; but by the
chance inquiry possible to me I find no book which fairly states
the difficulties of accounting for even the ordinary aspects of the
sky. I shall, therefore, be able in this section to do little more
than suggest inquiries to the reader, putting the subject in a clear
form for him. All men accustomed to investigation will confirm
me in saying that it is a great step when we are personally quite
certain what we do not know.

I 4_ First, then, I believe we do not know what makes clouds float.
Clouds are water, in some fine form or another; but water is
heavier than air, and the finest form you can give a heavy thing
will not make it float in a light thing. On it, yes; as a boat: but
in it, no. Clouds are not boats, nor boat-shaped, and they float
in the air, not on the top of it. " Nay, but though unlike boats,
may they not be like feathers? If out of quill substance there
may be constructed eider-down, and out of vegetable tissue, thistle-
down, both buoyant enough for a time, surely of water-tissue may
be constructed also water-down, which will bo buoyant enough
for all cloudy purposes." Not so. Throw out your eider plumage
in a calm day, and it will all come settling to the ground: slowly
indeed, to aspect; but practically so fast that all our finest clouds
would be here in a heap about our ears in an hour or two, if they
were only made of water feathers. " But may they not be quill
feathers, and have air inside them ? May not all their particles
be minute little balloons?"

A balloon only floats when the air inside it is either specifically,

108 THE CLOUD-BALANCINGS. PAET VII.

or by beating, lighter than the air it floats in. If the cloiTd-feathers
had warm air inside their quills, a cloud would be warmer than the
air about it, which it is not (I believe). And if the cloud-feathers
had hydrogen inside their quills, a cloud would be unwholesome for
breathing, which it is not—at least so it seems to me.

"But may they not have nothing inside their-quills?" Then
they would rise, as bubbles do through water, just as certainly as,
if they were solid feathers, they would fall. All our clouds would
go up to the top of the air, and swim in eddies of cloud-foam.

"But is not that just what they do?" No. They float at
different heights, and with definite forms, in the body of the air
itself. If they rose like foam, the sky on a cloudy day would look
like a very large flat glass of champagne seen from below, with
a stream of bubbles (or clouds) going up as fast as they could to a
flat foam-ceiling.

" But may they not be just so nicely mixed out of something
and nothing, as to float where they are wanted?"

Yes : that is just what they not only may, but must be: only
this way of mixing something and nothing is the very thing I want
to explain or have explained, and cannot do it, nor get it done.

Except thus far. It is conceivable that minute hollow
spherical globules might be formed of water, in which the
enclosed vacuity just balanced the weight of the enclosing water,
and that the arched sphere formed by the watery film was strong
enough to prevent the pressure of the atmosphere from breaking
it in. Such a globule would float like a balloon at the height
in the atmosphere where the equipoise between the vacuum it
enclosed, and its own excess of weight above that of the air, was
exact. It would, probably, approach its companion globules by re-
ciprocal attraction, and form aggregations which might be visible.

This is, I believe, the view usually taken by meteorologists. I
state it as a possibility, to be taken into account in examining the
question—a possibility confirmed by the scriptural words which I
have taken for the title of this chapter.

Nevertheless, I state it as a possibility only, not seeing how
any known operation of physical law could explain the formation
of such molecules. This, however, is not the only difficulty.

■pi m mill I . ........mil III I . in

ciiAP. 1. THE CLOUD-BALANCINGS. 109

Whatever shape the water is thrown into, it seems at first im-
probable that it should lose its property of wetness. Minute
division of rain, as in " Scotch mist," makes it capable of floating
farther,^ or floating up and down a little, just as dust will float,
though pebbles will not; or gold-leaf, though a sovereign will not;
but minutely divided rain wets as much as any other kind,
whereas a cloud, partially always, sometimes entirely, loses its
power of moistening. Some low clouds look, when you are in
them, as if they were made of specks of dust, like short hairs; and
these clouds are entirely dry. And also many clouds will w^et
some substances, but not others. So that we must grant farther,
if we are to be happy in our theory, that the spherical molecules
are held together by an attraction which prevents their adhering
to any foreign body, or perhaps ceases only under some peculiar
electric conditions.

§ 7. The question remains, even supposing their production accounted
for,—What intermediate states of water may exist between these
spherical hollow molecules and pure vapour ?

Has the reader ever considered the relations of commonest
forms of volatile substance ? The invisible particles which cause
the scent of a rose-leaf, how minute, how multitudinous, passing
richly away into the air continually! The visible cloud of frank-

' The buoyancy of solid bodies of a given specific gravity, iu a given fluid, depends,
first on their size, then on their fonns.

Eirst, on tlicir size; that is to say, on the proportion of the magnitude of the
object (iiTcspective of the distribution of its particlcs) to the magnitude of the par-
ticles of the air.

Thus, a grain of sand is buoyant in wind, but a large stone is not; and pebbles
and sand are buoyant in ivatcr in proportion to their sinallness, fine dust taking long to
sink, while a large stone sinks at once. Tlius, we sec that water may be arranged in
drops of any magnitude, from the largest rain-di'op, about the size of a large pea, to an
atom so small as not to be separately visible, the smallest rain passing gradually into
mist. Of these drops of different sizes (supposing the strength of the wind the same),
the largest fall fastest, the' smaller drops arc more buoyant, and the small misty rain
Hoats about like a cloud, as often up as down, so that an umbrella is useless in it ;
tliough in a heavy thunderstorm, if there is no wind, one may stand gathered up under
an und)rella without a drop touching the feet.

Secondly, buoyancy depends on the amount of surface which a given weight of the
substance exposes to the resistance of the substance'it floats iu. Thus, gold-leaf is in a
high degree buoyant, while the same quantity of gold in a compact gi-ain Avould fall
like a shot; and a feather is buoyant, though the same quantity of animal matter in a
compact form would be as heavy as a little stone. A slate blows far from a house-top,
while a brick falls vertically, or nearly so.

THE CLOUD-BALANCINGS.

incense — why visible? Is it in consequence of tlie greater
quantity, or larger size of tlie particles, and liow does tlie heat act
in throwing them off in this quantity, or of this size ?

Ask the same questions respecting water. It dries, that is,
becomes volatile, invisibly, at (any ?) temperature. Snow dries, as
water does. Under increase of heat, it volatilizes faster, so as to
become dimly visible in large mass, as a heat-haze. It reaches boiling
point, then becomes entirely visible. But compress it, so that no
air shall get between the watery particles—it is invisible again. At
the first issuing from the steam-pipe the steam is transparent;
but opaque, or visible, as it diffuses itself. The water is indeed
closer, because cooler, in that diffusion; but more air is between
its particles. Then this very question of visibility is an endless one,
wavering between form of substance and action of light. The
clearest (or least visible) stream becomes brightly opaque by more
minute division in its foam, and the clearest dew in hoar-frost.
Dust, unperceived in shade, becomes constantly visible in sunbeam ;
and watery vapour in the atmosphere, which is itself opaque, when
there is promise of fine weather, becomes exquisitely transparent;
and (questionably) blue, when it is going to rain.

Questionably blue: for besides Imowing very little about
water, we know what, except by courtesy, must, I think, be called
Nothing—about air. Is it the watery vapour, or the air itself, which
is blue ? Are neither blue, but only white, producing blue when
seen over dark spaces? If either blue, or white, why, when crimson
is their commanded dress, are the most distant clouds crimsonest ?
Clouds close to us may be blue, but far off", golden,—a strange
result, if the air is blue. And again, if blue, why are rays that
come through large spaces of it red; and that Alp, or anything else
that catches far-away light, why coloured red, at dawn and sunset ?
No one knows, I believe. It is true that many substances, as opal,
are blue, or green, by reflected light, yellow by transmitted; but
air, if blue at all, is blue always by transmitted light. I hear of a
wonderful solution of nettles, or other unlovely herb, which is
green when shallow,—red when deep. Perhaps some day, as the
motion of the heavenly bodies by help of an apple, their light by
help of a nettle, may be explained to mankind.

Ill

W

THE CLOUD-BALANCINGS.

§ 9. But farther: tliese questions of volatility, and visibility, and
hue, are all complicated with those of shape. How is a cloud
outlined ? Granted whatever you choose to ask, concerning its
material, or its aspect, its loftiness and lurainousness,—how of its
limitation? What hews it into a heap, or spins it into a web?
Cold is usually shapeless, I sujjpose, extending over large spaces
equally, or with gradual diminution. You cannot have, in the
open air, angles, and wedges, and coils, and cliffs of cold. Yet the
vapour stops suddenly, sharp and steep as a rock, or thrusts itself
across the gates of heaven in likeness of a brazen bar; or braids
itself in and out, and across and across, like a tissue of tapestry;
or falls into ripples, like sand; or into waving shreds and tongues,
as fire. On what anvils and wdieels is the vapour pointed, twisted,
hammered, whirled, as the potter's clay ? By what hands is the
incense of the sea built up into domes of marble ?

And, lastly, all these questions respecting substance, and aspect,
and shape, and line, and division, are involved with others as
inscrutable, concerning action. The curves in which clouds move
are unknown;—nay, the very method of their motion, or apparent
motion, how far it is by change of place, how far by appearance in
one place and vanishing from another. And these questions about
movement lead partly far away into high mathematics, where I
cannot follow them, and partly into theories concerning electricity
and infinite space, where I suppose at present no one can follow
them.

What, then, is the use of asking the questions ?

For my own part, I enjoy the mystery, and perhaps the reader
may. I think he ought. He should not be less grateful for
summer rain, or see less beauty in the clouds of morning, because
they come to prove him with hard questions; to which, perhaps, if
we look close at the heavenly scroll,^ we may find also a syllable
or two of answer illuminated here and there.

' There is a beautiful passage in Sartor liesartus conccniing this old Hebrew scroll,
in its deeper meanings, and the child's watching it, though long illegible for him, yet
" with an eye to the gilding." It signifies in a word or two nearly all that is to be said
about clouds.

112

CHAPTER 11.

THE CLOUD-FLOCKS.

§ 1. From tlie tenor of tlie foregoing chapter, the reader will, I hope, be
prepared to find me, though dogmatic (it is said) upon some occa-
sions, anything rather than dogmatic respecting clouds. I will
assume nothing concerning them, beyond the simple fact, that as a
floating sediment forms in a saturated liquid, vapour forms in the
body of the air; and all that I want the reader to be clear about in
the outset is that this vapour floats in and with the wind (as, if
you throw any thick colouring matter into a river, it floats with the
stream), and that it is not blown before a denser volume of the
wind, as a fleece of wool would be.

§ 2. At whatever height they form, clouds may be broadly con-
sidered as of two species only, massive and striated. I cannot find
a better word than massive, though it is not a good one, for I mean
it only to signify a fleecy arrangement in which no lines are visible.
The fleece may be so bright as to look like flying thistle-down, or
so diffused as to show no visible outline at all. Still if it is all of
one common texture, like a handful of wool, or a wreath of smoke,
I call it massive.

On the other hand, if divided by parallel lines, so as to look
more or less like spun-glass, I call it striated. In Plate 69,
Fig. 4, the top of the Aiguille Dru (Cliamouni) is seen emergent
above low striated clouds, with heaped massive cloud beyond.
I do not know in the least what causes this striation, except
that it depends on the nature of the cloud, not on the wind. The
strongest wind will not throw a cloud, massive by nature, into the
linear form. It will toss it about, and tear it to pieces, but not

spin it into threads. On tlie other hand, often without any wind at
all, the cloud will spin itself into threads fine as gossamer. These
threads are often said to be a prognostic of storm; but they are
not produced by storm,
§ 3. In the first volume, we considered all clouds as belonging to
three regions, that of the cirrus, the central cloud, and the rain-
cloud. It is of course an arrangement more of convenience than
of true description, for cirrous clouds sometimes form low as well
as high; and rain sometimes falls high as well as low. I will,
nevertheless, retain tliis old arrangement, which is practically as
serviceable as any.

Allowing, also, for various exceptions and modifications, these
three bodies of cloud may be generally distinguished in our minds
thus. The clouds of upper region are for the most part quiet, or
seem to be so, owing to their distance. They are formed now
of striated, now of massive substance; but always finely divided.
The central clouds are entirely of massive substance, but divided
into large ragged flakes or ponderous heaps. These heaps (cumuli)
and flakes, or drifts, present different phenomena, but must be
joined in our minds under the head of central cloud. The lower
clouds, bearing rain abundantly, arc composed partly of striated,
partly of massive substance; but may generally be comprehended
under the term rain-cloud.

Our business in this chapter, then, is with the upper clouds,
which, owing to their quietness and multitude, we may perhaps
conveniently think of as the "cloud-flocks." And we have to
discover if any laws of beauty attach to them, such as wc have
seen in mountains or tree-branches.
§ 4. On one of the few mornings of this winter, when the sky was
clear, and one of the far fewer, on which its clearness was visible
from the neighbourhood of London,—which now entirely loses at
least two out of three sunrises, owing to the environing smoke,—
the dawn broke beneath a broad field of level purple cloud, under
which floated ranks of divided cirri, composed of finely striated
vapour.

It was not a sky containing any extraordinary number of these
minor clouds; but each was more than usually distinct in sepa-

yol. v. i

THE CLOUD-FLOCKS.

ration from its neighbour, and as they showed in nearly pure pale
sc£irlet on the dark purple ground, they were easily to be counted.

§ 5. There were five or six ranks, from the zenith to the horizon;
that is to say, three distinct ones, and then two or three more
rmining together, and losing themselves in distance, in the manner
roughly shown in Fig. 79. The nearest rank w^as composed of
more than 150 rows of cloud, set ob-
liquely, as in the figure. I counted 150,
which was near the mark, and then
stopped, lest the light should fail, to
count the separate clouds in some of
the rows. The average number was
60 in each row, rather more than less.

There were therefore 150 x 60, that is, 9,000, separate clouds
in this one rank, or about 50,000 in the field of sight. Flocks of
Admetus under Apollo's keeping. Who else could shepherd such ?
He by day, dog Sirius by night; or huntress Diana herself—her
bright arrows driving away the clouds of prey that would ravage
her fair flocks. We must leave fancies, however; these wonderful
clouds need close looking at. I will try to draw one or two of them
before they fade.

§ G. On doing which we find, after all, they are not much more like
sheep than Canis Major is like a dog. Tliey resemble more some of
our old friends, the pine branches, covered with snow. The three,
forming the uppermost figure, in the Plate opposite, are as like three
of the fifty thousand as I could get them; complex enough in struc-
ture, even tins single group. Busy workers they must be, that twine
the braiding of them al] to the horizon, and down beyond it.

And who are these workers ? You have two questions here,
both difficult. What separates these thousands of clouds each
from the other, and each about equally from the other ? How can
they be drawn asunder, yet not allowed to part ? Looped lace as it
were, richest point—invisible threads fastening embroidered cloud
to cloud—the "plighted clouds" of Milton,—creatures of the
element— i

" That in the coloui's of the rainbow live,
And play in the plighted clouds."

wmmm

THE CLOUD-FLOCKS.

Compare Geraldine dressing:—

" Puts on her silken vestments white,
Aii<l tricks her hair in lovely plight."

And BritomartV

Her well-plighted frock
She low let fall, that flowed from her lanck side
Down to her foot, with careless modesty."

And; secondly, ^Yllat bends cacli of them into these flame-ljko
curves, tender ai^d various, as motions of a bird, liither and tliither ?

^ V y

A .

Fi"?. 80.

Perhaps you may hardly see the curves well in the softly finished
forms; here they are plainer in rude outline. Fig. 8O.1

^ Before going farther, I must say a word or two respecting method of drawing
clouds.

Absolutely well no cloud can bo drawn with the point; nothing but the most
dclicate management of the brush will exin-css its variety of edge and texture. By
laborious and tender engraving, a close approximation may be obtained either to nature
or to good painting ; and the engi-avings of sky by our modem line engravers are often
admirable;—in many respects as good as can be, and to my mind the best p.art of their

1 2

116 THE CLOUD-FLOCKS. part vii.

§ What is it that throws them into these lines ?

Eddies of wind ?

Nay, an eddy of wind will not stay quiet for three minutes, as
that cloud did to be drawn; as all the others did, each in his
place. You see there is perfect harmony among the curves. They
all flow into each other as the currents of a stream do. If you throw
dust that will float on the surface of a slow river, it will arrange
itself in lines somewhat like these. To a certain extent, indeed, it
is true that there are gentle currents of change in the atmosphere,

work. There still exist some early proofs of Miller's plate of the Grand Canal, Venice,
in which the sky is the likest thing to Turner's work I have ever seen in large en-
gravings. The plate was spoiled after a few impressions were taken off, hy desire of
the publisher. The sky was so exactly like Timier's that he thought it would not
please the public, and had all the fine cloud-drawing rubbed away to make it soft.

The Plate opposite page 122, by Mr. Annytage, is also, I think, a superb specimen
of engraving, though, in result, not so good as the one just spoken of, because this was
done from my copy of Turner's sky, not from the picture itself.

But engraving of this finished kind cannot, by reason of its costliness, be given for
every illustration of cloiid form. Nor, if it could, can skies be sketched with the com-
pletion Avhich would bear it. It is sometimes possible to draw one cloud out of fifty
thousand with something like fidelity before it fades. But if we want the arrange-
ment of the fifty thousand, they can only be indicated with the rudest lines, and
finished from memory. It was, as we shall see presently, only by his gigantic powers
of memoiy that Turner was enabled to draw skies as he did.

Now, I look upon my own memoiy of clouds, or of anything else, as of no value
whatever. All the drawings on Avhich I have ever rested an assertion have been made
without stin-ing from the spot ; and in sketching clouds from nature, it is very seldom
desirable to use the bmsh. Tor broad effects and notes of colour (though these, hastily
made, are always inaccurate, and letters indicating the colour do nearly as well) the
brash may be sometiines useful ; but, in most cases, a dark pencil, which will lay shade
with its side and draw lines •with its point, is the best instrument. Tunier almost always
outlhied merely with the point, being able to remember the relations of shade without
the slightest chance of en'or. The pomt, at all events, is needful, however much stmnp
work may be added to it. ,

Now, in translating sketches made Avitli the pencil point into engi-aving, we must
either engrave delicately and expensively, or be content to Biibstitute for the soft
varied pencil lines the finer and uncloudlike touchcs of the pen. It is best to do this
boldly, if at all, and without the least aim at fineness of effect, to lay domi a vigorous
black line as the limit of the eloud-fonn or action. The more subtle a painter's
finished work, the more fearless he is in using the vigorous black line when he is
making memoranda, or treating his subject conventionally. At the top of page 224,
Vol. IV., the reader may see the kind of outline which Titian uses for clouds in his
pen work. Usually he is even bolder and coarser. And in the rude woodcuts I am
goin;;^ to employ here, I believe the reader will find ultimately that, with whatever ill
success used by me, the means of expression are the fullest and most convenient that
can be adopted, short of finished engraving, while there are some conditions of cloud-
action which I satisfy myself better iu expressing by tlicsc coarse lines than in any
other way.

7

cuAr. 11. THE CLOUD-FLOCKS, 117

wliicli move slo^^■lJ enough to permit in the clouds that follow them
some appearance of stabilitj. But how to obtain change so com-
plex in an infinite number of consecutive spaces;—fifty thousand
separate groups of current in half of a morning sky, with quiet
invisible vapour between, or none;—and yet all obedient to one
ruling law, gone forth through their companies;—each marshalled
to their white standards, in great unity of warlike march, unar-
rested, unconfused ? " One shall not thrust another, they shall
walk every one in his own path."

§ 8. These questions occur, at first sight, respecting every group of
cirrus cloud. Whatever the form may be, whether branched, as
in this instance, or merely rippled, or thrown into shield-like
segments, as in Fig. 81—a frequent arrangement—there is still the
same difficulty in account- .

ing satisfactorily for the
individual forces which

regulate the similar shape
of each mass, while all are
moved by a general force
that has apparently no

influence on the divided I'ig- 8i.

structure. Thus the mass of clouds disposed as in Fig. 81 will
probably move, mutually, in the direction of the arrow; that is to
say, sideways, as far as their separate curvature is concerned. I
suppose it probable that as the science of electricity is more perfectly
systematized, the explanation of many circumstances of cloud-form
will be rendered by it. At present I see no use in troubling the
reader or myself with conjectures which a year's progress in science
might either effectively contradict or supersede. All that I want is,
that we should have our questions ready to put clearly to the elec^
tricians when the electricians are ready to answer us.

§ 9, It is possible that some of the loveliest conditions of these
parallel clouds may be owing to a structure which I forgot to
explain, when it occurred in rocks, in the course of the last volume.

When they are finely stratified, and their surfaces abraded by
broad, shallow furrows, the edges of the beds, of course, are thrown
into undulations, and at some distance, where the furrows disappear,

THE CLOUD-FLOCKS. I'AllT YII.

118

the surface looks £ls iiP the rock had flowed over it in successive
waves, Slich a condition is seen on the left at the top in Fig. 17
in Yol. IV. Supposing a series of beds of vapoui: cut across by a
straight sloping current of air, and so placed as to catch the light
on their edges, we should have a series of
curved lights, looking like independent clouds.

§ 10- I believe conditions of form like those
in Fig. 82 (turn the book with its outside
edge down) may not unfrequently be thus,
owing to stratification, when they occur in ^^^ y^

the nearer sky. This line of cloud is far oif
at the horizon, drifting towards the left (the
points of course forward), and isj I suppose,
a series of nearly circular eddies seen in per-
spective.

Which question of perspective we must
examine a little before going a step farther.

In order to simplify it, let us assume that
the under surfaces of clouds are flat, and
lie in a horizontal extended field. This is
in great measure the fact, and notable per-
spective phenomena depend on the approxima-
tion of clouds to such a condition.

§ 11. Referring the reader to my Elements of
Perspective for statements of law which Avould
be in this place tiresome, I can only ask him to
take my word for it that the three figures in
Plate 64 represent limiting lines of sky per-
spective, as they would appear over a large
space of the sky. Supposing that the breadth '"JY^^
included was one fourth of the horizon, the
shaded portions in the central figure represent
square fields of cloud,'' and those in the upper- ^^

> If the figures are supposed to includc less than one-fourth of the horizon, the
shaded figures represent diahiond-shaped clouds; but the reader cannot understand
this without studying perspective laws accurately.

chap. ii. THE CLOUD-FLOCKS. 119

most figure narrow triangles, with tlieir shortest side next us, but
sloping a little away from us.

In each figure, the shaded portions show the perspective limits
of cloud-masses, which, in reality, are arranged in perfectly straight
lines, are all similar, and are equidistant from each other. Their
exact relative positions are marked by the lines connecting tlitem,
and may be determined by the reader if he knows perspective.
If he does not, he may be surprised at first to be told that the stub-
born and blunt little triangle, Fig. 1, Plate 64, represents a cloud
precisely similar, and similarly situated, to that represented by the
thin triangle, a; and, in like manner, the stout diamond, a, Fig. 2,
represents precisely the same form and size of cloud as the thin
strip at h. He may perhaps think it still more curious that the
retiring perspective which causes stoutness in the triangle, causes
leanness in the diamond.^
§ 12. Still greater confusion in aspect is induced by the apparent
change caused by perspective in the direction of the wind. If
Fig. 3 be sujpposed to include a quarter of the horizon, the
spaces, into which its straight lines divide it, represent squares
of sky. The curved lines, which cross these spaces from corner
to corner, are precisely parallel throughout; and, therefore, two
clouds moving, one on the curved line from a to 6, and the other
on the other side, from c to d^ would, in reality, be moving
with the same wind, in parallel lines. In Plate 66, wliicli is a
sketch of an actual sunset behind Beauvais cathedral (the point
of the roof of the apse, a little to the left of the centre, shows it
to be a summer sunset), the white cirri in the high liglit are all
moving eastward, away from the sun, in perfectly parallel lines,
curving a little round to the south. Underneath, are two straight
ranks of rainy cirri, crossing each other; one directed soiith-east;
the other, north-west. The meeting perspective of these, in
extreme distance, determines the shai)e of the angular light
which opens above the cathedral. Undisrneath all, fragmetils of
true rain-cloud are floating between us and the sun, governed by

' In reality, tlie retiring ranks of cloud, if long enough, would, of course, go on
converging to tlie horizon. I do not continue them, because the figures would bccomc
too compressed.

curves of their own. They are, nevertheless, connected with the
straight cirri by the dark semi-cumulus in the middle of the
shade above the cathedral.

§ 13. Sky perspective, however, remains perfectly simple, so long
as it can be reduced to any rectilinear arrangement; but when
nearly the whole system is curved, which nine times out of ten
is the case, it becomes embarrassing. The central figure in
Plate 65 represents the simplest possible combination of perspec-
tive of straight lines with that of curves, a group of concentric
circles of small clouds being supposed to cast shadows from the
sun near the horizon. Such shadows are often cast in misty air;
the aspect of rays about the sun being, in fact, only caused by
spaces between them. They are carried out formally and far in
the Plate, to show how curiously they may modify the arrange-
ment of light in a sky. The woodcut, Fig. 83, gives roughly the

arrangement of the clouds in Turner's Pools of Solomon, in which
he has employed a concentric system of circles of this kind, and
thus lighted. In the perspective figure the clouds are represented
as small square masses, for the sake of greater simplicity, and are
so beaded or strung as it were on the curves in which they move,
as to keep their distances precisely equal, and their sides parallel.
This is the usual condition of cloud: for though arranged m
curved ranks, each cjoud has its face to the front, or, at all events.

..i

chap. ii. THE CLOUD-FLOCKS. 121

acts in some parallel line—generally another curve—witli those
next to it: being rarely, except in the form of fine radiating strire,
arranged on the cmrves as at a. Fig. 84; but as at h, or c. It
O-__^

would make the diagram too complex if I gave one of intersecting
curves; but the lowest figure in Plate 65, represents, in perspec-
tive, two groups of ellipses arranged in equidistant straight and
parallel lines, and following each other on two circular curves.
Their exact relative position is shown in Fig. 2, Plate 56. While
the uppermost figure in Plate Go represents in parallel perspective,
a series of ellipses arranged in radiation on a circle, their exact
relative size and position are shown in Fig. 3, Plate 56, and the
lines of such a sky as would be produced by them, roughly, in
Fig. 90, facing page 132.^

§ 14, And in these figures, which, if we look up the subject rightly,
would be but the first and simplest of the series necessary
to illustrate the action of the upper cirri, the reader may see,
at once, how necessarily painters, untrained in observance of pro-
portion, and ignorant of perspective, must lose in every touch the
expression of buoyancy and space in sky. The absolute forms of
each cloud are, indeed, not alike, as the ellipses in the engraving;
but assuredly, when moving in groups of this kind, there are
among them the same proportioned inequalities of relative dis-
tance, the same gradated changes from ponderous to elongated
form, the same exquisite suggestions of including curve; and a
common painter, dotting his clouds down at random, or in more
or less equal masses, can no more pamt a sky, than he could, by
random dashes for its ruined arches, paint the Coliseum.

§ 15. Whatever approximation to the character of upper clouds may

' I use ellipses in order to make these figures easily intelligible ; the ounces actually
are variable curves, of the nature of the cycloid, or other curves of continuous motion;
probably produced by a cun-ent moving in some such dircctiQi} a? that indicated by the
dotted lino in Fig. 3, Plate 56.

n

THE CLOUD-FLOCKS.

have been readied by some of our modern students, it will bo
found, on careful analysis, tliat Turner stands more absolutely
alone in this gift of cloud-drawing than in any other of his
great powers. Observe, I say, clond-draioing; other great men
coloured clouds beautifully; none but he ever drew them truly:
this power coming from his constant habit of drawing skies, like
everything else, with the pencil point. It is quite impossible
to engrave any of his large finished skies on a small scale; but the
woodcut. Fig. 85, wall give some idea of the forms of cloud
involved in one of his small drawings. It is only half of the sky
in question, that of Rouen from St. Catherine's Hill, in the Rivers
of France. Its clouds are arranged on two systems of intersecting
circles, crossed beneath by long bars very slightly bent. The
form of every separate cloud is completely studied; the manner
of drawing them will be understood better by help of the Plate
opposite, which is a piece of the sky above the "Campo Santo,^"
at Venice, exhibited in 1842. It is exquisite in rounding of the
separate fragments and buoyancy of the rising central group, as
well as in its expression of the wayward influence of curved
lines of breeze on a generally rectilinear system of cloud.

To follow the subject farther would, however, lead ns into
doctrine of circular storms, and all kinds of pleasant, but infinite,
difficulty, from which temptation I keep clear, believing that
enough is now stated to enable the reader to understand what
he is to look for in Turner's skies; and what kind of power,
thought, and science are involved continually in the little white
or purple dashes of cloud-spray, which, in subh pictures as the
San Benedetto, looking to Fusina, the Napoleon^j or the Temeraire,
guide the eye to the horizon more by their true perspective than
by their aerial tone, and are buoyant, not so much by ex-
pression of lightness as of motion.^

' Now in the possession of E. Bickncll, Esq.j who kindly lent me the iMCtui'ej that
I might make this di-awing from it carefiilly.

» I cannot yet engrarc these ; hut the little study of a single rank of cimis, the
lowest in Plate 63, may sei-ve to show the value of perspective in expressing buoyancy.
It is not, however, though bedutifully engraved by Mr. Annytage, as delicate as it
fehould be, in the fineir threads which indicate increasing distance at the extremity.
Compare the rising of the lines of curve at the edges of this mass, with the similar
action on a larger scale, of Timier's cloud, opposite.

cuAr. 11. THK CLOUD-FLOCKS. 123

§ 17- I say the "white or purple" cloud-spray. One word yet may
be permitted me respecting the mystery of that colour. What
should we have thought—if we had lived in a country where there
were no clouds, but only low mist or fog—of any stranger who
had told us that;, in his country, these mists rose into the air, and
became purple, crimson, scarlet, and gold? I am aware of no
sufficient explanation of these hues of the upper clouds, nor of
tlieir strange mingling of opacity with a power of absorbing light.
All clouds are so opaque that, however delicate they may be, you
never sefe one through another. Six feet depth of them, at a little
distance, will wholly veil the darkest mountain edge; so that,
whether for light or shade, they tell upon the sky as body colour
on canvass ; they have always a perfect surface and bloom;—
delicate as a rose-leaf, when required of them, but never poor
or meagre in hue, like old-fashioned water-colours. And, if
needed, in mass, they will bear tliemselves for solid force of
hue against any rock. Opposite, I have engraved a memo-
randum made of a clear sunset after rain, from the top of Milan
cathedral. The greater part of the outline is granite—Monte
Rosa—the rest cloud; but it and the granite were dark alike.
Trequently, in effects of this kind, the cloud is darker of the two.^
And this opacity is, nevertheless, obtained without destroying the
gift they have of letting broken light through them, so that,
between us and the sun, they may become golden fleeces, and float
as fields of light.

Now their distant colours depend on these two properties
together; partly on the opacity, which enables them to reflect
light strongly ; partly on a spongelike power of gathering light
into their bodies.

I 18. Long ago it was noted by Aristotle, and again by Leonardo,
that vaporous bodies looked russet, or even red, when warm light
was seen through them, and blue, when deep shade was seen
through them. Both colours may, generally, be seen on dny wreath
of cottage smoke.

124 THE CLOUD-FLOCKS. part vn.

Whereon, easy conclusion has heen sometimes founded by
modern reasoners. All red in sky is caused by light seen through
vapour, and all blue by shade seen through vapour.

Easy, indeed, but not sure, even in cloud-colour only. It is
true that the smoke of a town may be of a rich brick red against
golden twilight; and of a very lovely, though not bright, blue
against shade. But I never saw crimson or scarlet smoke, nor
ultramarine smoke.

Even granting that watery vapour in its purity may give' the
colours more clearly, the red colours are by no means always
relieved against light. The finest scarlets are constantly seen in
broken flakes on a deep purple ground of heavier cloud beyond,
and some of the loveliest rose-colours on clouds in the east, opposite
the sunset, or in the west in the morning. Nor are blues always
attainable by throwing vapour over shade. Especially, you cannot
get them by putting it over blue itself. A thin vapour on dark blue
sky is of a warm gray, not blue. A thunder-cloud, deep enough to
conceal everything behind it, is often dark lead colour, or sul-
phurous blue; but the thin vapours crossing it, milky white. The
vividest hues are connected also with another attribute of clouds,
their lustre—metallic in effect, watery in reality. They not only
reflect colour as dust or wool would, but, when far ofl^, as water
would J sometimes even giving a distinct image of the sun
underneath the orb itself;—in all cases becoming dazzling in lustre,
when at a low angle, capable of strong reflection. Practically, this
low angle is only obtained when the cloud seems near the sun,
and hence we get into the careless habit of looking at the golden
reflected light as if it were actually caused by nearness to the
fiery ball.

§ 19- Without, however, troubling ourselves at all about laws, or
causes of colour, the visible consequences of their operation arc
notably these—that when near us, clouds present only subdued
and uncertain colours; but when far from us, and struck by the
sun on their under surfaces—so that the greater part of the light
they receive is reflected—they may become golden, purple, scarlet,
and intense fiery white, mingled in all kinds of gradations, such as
I tried to describe in the chapter on the upper clouds in the first

123

CHAPTER III.

THE CLOUD-CHARIOTS.

§ 1. Between the flocks of small countless clouds wliicli occupy tlie
liigliest heavens, and the gray undivided film of the true rain-
cloud, form the fixed masses or torn fleeces, sometimes collected
and calm, sometimes fiercely drifting, -which are, nevertheless,
known under one general name of cumulus, or heaped cloud.

The true cumulus, the most majestic of clouds, and almost the
only one which attracts the notice of ordinary observers, is for the
most part windless; the movement of its masses being solemn,
continuous, inexplicable, a steady advance or retiring, as if they
were animated by an inner will, or compelled by an unseen power.
They appear to be peculiarly connected with heat, forming per-
fectly only in the afternoon, and melting away in the evening.
Their noblest conditions are strongly electric, and connect them-
selves with storm-cloud and true thunder-cloud. When there is
thunder in the air, they will form in cold weather, or early in the
day. j

§ 2. I have never succeeded in drawing a cumulus. Its divisions of
surface are grotesque and endless, as those of a mountain;—perfectly
defined, brilliant beyond all power of colour, and transitory as a
dream. Even Turner never attempted to paint them, any more
than he did the snows of the high Alps.

Nor can I explain them any more than I can draw them. The
ordinary account given of their structure is, I believe, that the
moisture raised from the earth by the sun's heat becomes visible by
condensation at a certain height in the colder air, that the level of
the condensing point is that of the cloud's base, and that above it,

"r- r ' ^ ^-"-raiirr-...... -liMiii - ^.«.-ly:;»!

m

CHAPTER III.

THE CLOUD-CHARIOTS.

§ 1. Bktween tlie flocks of small countless clouds wliicli occupy tlie
highest heavens, and the gray undivided film of the true rain-
cloud, form the fixed masses or torn fleeces, sometimes collected
and calm, sometimes fiercely drifting, which are, nevertheless,
known under one general name of cumulus, or heaped cloud.

The true cumulus, the most majestic of clouds, and almost the
only one which attracts the notice of ordinary observers, is for the
most part windless; the movement of its masses heing solemn,
continuous, inexplicable, a steady advance or retiring, as if they
were animated by an inner will, or compelled by an unseen power.
They appear to be peculiarly connected with heat, forming per-
fectly only in the afternoon, and melting away in tlie evening.
Their noblest conditions are strongly electric, and connect them-
selves with storm-cloud and true thunder-cloud. When there is
thunder in the air, they will form in cold weather, or eai'ly in the
day. !

§ 2. I have never succeeded in drawing a cumulus. Its divisions of
surface are grotesque and endless, as those of a mountain;—perfectly
defined, brilliant beyond all power of colour, and transitory as a
dream. Even Turner never attempted to paint them, any more
than he did the snows of the high Alps.

Nor can I explain them any more than I can draw them. The
ordinary account given of their structure is, I believe, that the
moisture raised from the earth by the sun's heat becomes visible by
condensation at a certain height in the colder air, that the level of
the condensing point is that of the cloud's base, and that above it,

CHAP. III. THE CLOITD-CHAEIOTS. 127

the heaps are pushed up higher and higher as more vapour accu-
mulates, till, towards evening, the supply beneath ceases; and at
sunset, the fall of dew enables the surrounding atmosphere to
absorb and melt them away. Very plausible. But it seems to me
herein unexplained how the vapour is held together in those heaps.
If the clear air about and above it has no aqueous vapour in it, or
at least a much less quantity, why does not the clear air keep
pulling the cloud to pieces, eating it away, as steam is consumed in
open air ? Or, if any cause prevents such rapid devouring of it,
why does not the aqueous vapour diffuse itself softly in the air like
smoke, so that one -would not know where the cloud ended?
What should make it bind itself in those solid mounds, and stay
so:—positive, fantastic, defiant, determined?