Felix stood in an art gallery, and leaning on his crutches looked up at Church’s “Heart of the Andes.”

“You are impressed by the solemnity and the holy repose of nature; for here you look upon a pictured cathedral, built not by mortal hands, but by the architect of the universe.  Felix, does it not recall to your mind something of which we often speak?”

The boy was silent for a few seconds, and then his thin, sallow face brightened.

“Yes, indeed!  You mean that splendid description which you read to me from ‘Modern Painters’?  How fond you are of that passage, and how very often you think of it!  Let me see whether I can remember it.”

Slowly but accurately he repeated the eloquent tribute to “Mountain Glory,” from the fourth volume of “Modern Painters.”

“Felix, you know that a celebrated English poet, Keats, has said, ’A thing of beauty is a joy forever’; and as I can never hope to express my ideas in half such beautiful language as Mr. Ruskin uses, it is an economy of trouble to quote his words.  Some of his expressions are like certain songs which, the more frequently we sing them, the more valuable and eloquent they become; and as we rarely learn a fine piece of music to be played once or twice and then thrown aside, why should we not be allowed the same privilege with verbal melodies?  Last week you asked me to explain to you what is meant by ‘aerial perspective,’ and if you will study the atmosphere in this great picture, Mr. Church, will explain it much more clearly to you than I was able to do.”

“Yes, Miss Earl, I see it now.  The eye could travel up and up, and on and on, and never get out of the sky; and it seems to me those birds yonder would fly entirely away, out of sight, through that air in the picture.  But, Miss Earl, do you really believe that the Chimborazo in South America is as grand as Mr. Church’s?  I do not, because I have noticed that pictures are much handsomer than the real things they stand for.  Mamma carried me last spring to see some paintings of scenes on the Hudson River, and when we went travelling in the summer, I saw the very spot where the artist stood when he sketched the hills and the bend of the river, and it was not half so pretty as the picture.  And yet I know God is the greatest painter.  Is it the far-off look that everything wears when painted.

“Yes, the ‘far-off look,’ as you call it, is one cause of the effect you wish to understand; and it has been rather more elegantly expressed by Campbell, in the line: 

‘’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view.’