more attractive than a sand-desert.  But comparing a landscape with a statue, or even Painting generally with Sculpture, the connection between a happy effect and any definite arrangement of lines is much looser, and depends on the combination rather than the ingredients.  It is in every one’s experience that an accidental light, or even an accidental susceptibility, will impart to the meagrest landscape—­a bare marsh, a scraggy hill-pasture—­a charm of which the separate features, or the whole, at another time, give no hint.  Often mere bareness, openness, absence of objects, will arouse a deeper feeling than the most famous scenes.  We learn from such experiences that the difference between one patch of earth and another is wholly superficial, and indicates not so much anything in it as a greater or less dulness in us.  The celebrated panoramas and points of view are not the favorite haunts of great painters.  They do not need to travel far for their subjects.  Mr. Ruskin tells us that Turner did not paint the high Alps, nor the cumulus, the grandest form of cloud.  Calame gives us the nooks and lanes, the rocks and hills, of Switzerland, rather than the high peaks; Lambinet, an apple-orchard, a row of pollard-elms, or a weedy pond,—­not cataracts or forests.  This is not affectation or timidity, but an instinct that the famous scenes are no breaks in the order of Nature,—­that what is seen in them is visible elsewhere as well, only not so obvious, and that the office of Art is not to parrot what is already distinct, but to reveal it where it is obscure.  This makes the inspiration of the artist; this is the source of all his power, and alone distinguishes him from the topographer and view-maker.

This transcendentalism is more evident in Painting, as the later and more developed form; but it is common to all Art, and may be read also in the Greek sculptures.  The experience of every one who with some practice of eye comes for the first time to see the best antiques is not that he falls at once to admiring the perfection of their anatomy, and wondering at the symmetry and complete development of the men and women of those days, but rather that he is carried away from all comparison and criticism into a solitude from which returning he discovers that his previous acquaintance with Sculpture was with masks only, and that the meaning of plastic art as a capital interest of the human mind is now for the first time made known to him.  He sees that it was no whim of the Greeks, but an instinct of the infinity it typifies, that made them take the human form as alone possessing beauty enough to stand by itself.  Not the images of their deities alone, but all their statues were gods.  The charm of the Lizard-Slayer of Praxiteles, or of those immortal riders that swept along the friezes of the Parthenon, is something quite distinct from the beauty of a naked boy playing with an arrow, or a troop of Athenian citizens on horseback.  These are the deathless