specific character and to give unity and grace, but never enough to
repeat in one group what was done in another, never enough to prevent
the eye from feeling that, however regular and mathematical may be the
structure of parts, what is composed out of them is as various and
infinite as any other part of nature. Nor does this take place in
general effect only. Break off an elm bough three feet long, in full
leaf, and lay it on the table before you, and try to draw it, leaf for
leaf. It is ten to one if in the whole bough (provided you do not twist
it about as you work) you find one form of leaf exactly like another;
perhaps you will not even have _one_ complete. Every leaf will be
oblique, or foreshortened, or curled, or crossed by another, or shaded
by another, or have something or other the matter with it; and though
the whole bough will look graceful, and symmetrical, you will scarcely
be able to tell how or why it does so, since there is not one line of it
like another....

But if Nature is so various when you have a bough on the table before
you, what must she be when she retires from you, and gives you her whole
mass and multitude? The leaves then at the extremities become as fine as
dust, a mere confusion of points and lines between you and the sky, a
confusion which you might as well hope to draw sea-sand particle by
particle, as to imitate leaf for leaf. This, as it comes down into the
body of the tree, gets closer, but never opaque; it is always
transparent, with crumbling lights in it letting you through to the sky;
then, out of this, come, heavier and heavier, the masses of illumined
foliage, all dazzling and inextricable, save here and there a single
leaf on the extremities; then, under these, you get deep passages of
broken irregular gloom, passing into transparent, green-lighted, misty
hollows; the twisted stems glancing through them in their pale and
entangled infinity, and the shafted sunbeams, rained from above, running