own mind create forms according to the severe laws of the intellect, in

order to generate in himself that co-ordination of freedom and law, that

involution of obedience in the prescript, and of prescript in the impulse

to obey, which assimilates him to nature, and enables him to understand

her. He merely absents himself for a season from her, that his own

spirit, which has the same ground with nature, may learn her unspoken

language in its main radicals, before he approaches to her endless

compositions of them. Yes, not to acquire cold notions -lifeless

technical rules-but living and life-producing ideas, which shall

contain their own evidence, the certainty that they are essentially one

with the germinal causes in nature - his consciousness being the focus

and mirror of both - for this does the artist for a time abandon the

external real in order to return to it with a complete sympathy with its

internal and actual. For of all we see, hear, feel, and touch the

substance is and must be in ourselves; and therefore there is no

alternative in reason between the dreary (and thank heaven! almost

impossible) belief that everything around us is but a phantom, or that

the life which is in us is in them likewise; and that to know is to

resemble, when we speak of objects out of ourselves, even as within

ourselves to learn is, according to Plato, only to recollect;-the only

effective answer to which, that I have been fortunate to meet with, is

that which Pope has consecrated for future use in the line-

"And coxcombs vanquish Berkeley with a grin!"

The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is

active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols-the

Natur-geist, or spirit of nature, as we unconsciously imitate those

whom we love; for so only can he hope to produce any work truly

natural in the object and truly human in the effect. The idea which puts

the form together cannot itself be the form. It is above form, and is its

essence, the universal in the individual, or the individuality itself-the

glance and the exponent of the indwelling power.