To view the graceful deer come tripping by,
Then stop and gaze, then turn, they know not why,
Like bashful younkers in society.
To mark the structure of a plant or tree,
And all fair things of earth, how fair they be.’
I have wandered far enough from Burleigh House; but I had some associations about it which I could not well get rid of, without troubling the reader with them.
The Rembrandts disappointed me quite. I could hardly find a trace of the impression which had been inlaid in my imagination. I might as well
‘Hunt half a day for a forgotten dream.’
Instead of broken wrinkles and indented flesh, I saw hard lines and stained canvas. I had seen better Rembrandts since, and had learned to see nature better. Was it a disadvantage, then, that for twenty years I had carried this fine idea in my brain, enriching it from time to time from my observations of nature or art, and raising it as they were raised; or did it much signify that it was disturbed at last? Neither. The picture was nothing to me: it was the idea it had suggested. The one hung on the wall at Burleigh; the other was an heir-loom in my mind. Was it destroyed, because the picture, after long absence, did not answer to it? No. There were other pictures in the world that did, and objects in nature still more perfect. This is the melancholy privilege of art; it exists chiefly in idea, and is not liable to serious reverses. If we are disappointed in the character of one we love, it breaks the illusion altogether; for we drew certain consequences from a face. If an old friendship is broken up, we cannot tell how to replace it, without the aid of habit and a length of time. But a picture is nothing but a face; it interests us only in idea. Hence we need never be afraid of raising our standard of taste too high; for the mind rises with it, exalted and refined, and can never be much injured by finding out its casual mistakes. Like the possessor of a splendid collection, who is indifferent to or turns away from common pictures, we have a selector gallery in our own minds. In this sense, the knowledge of art is its own exceeding great reward. But is there not danger that we may become too fastidious, and have nothing left to admire? None: for the conceptions of the human soul cannot rise superior to the power of art; or if they do, then we have surely every reason to be satisfied with them. The mind, in what depends upon itself alone, ‘soon rises from defeat unhurt,’ though its pride may be for a moment ‘humbled by such rebuke,’
‘And in its liquid texture mortal wound