We have dwelt thus lengthily upon this primitive and apparently less
important branch of Landscape Art for several reasons: from a conviction
that its importance is, and is only apparently less; from the fact that
from it have been derived all other classes of landscape; and because a
comprehension of its scope and purpose aids more than any other agency
in understanding those of the pure and simple Landscape Art.

We have seen Nature ever ready with moods so related to the soul that
no ideal worthy of Art might be conceived beyond the range of her
sympathies. Even to that event involving all the intensity of human
thought and feeling, the last refinement of all spiritual emotion, and
a sense of mysteries more sublime than the creation of worlds,--even to
the Crucifixion,--Nature gathered herself, as the only possible
sign, the only expression for men, then and forever, of the awful
significance. The joyfulness of festivals, the pomp of processions,
the sublimity of great martyrdoms, the sorrow of defeats, the peace of
holiness, the innocence and sweetness of childhood, the hope of manhood,
and the retrospection of old age, when represented upon the canvas, find
in her forms and colors endless refrain of response.

This truth, that Nature is capable of such cooperation with the human,
that she confines herself to no country or continent, and that her
expressions are not relative, depending upon the suggestiveness of the
human action to which they correspond, but are positive and under the
rule of the immutable, enables the artist to evolve the first great
class of simple landscape-painting.

Had Art always been real and artists ever true, this consideration must
have called forth this class. It being true that natural scenery readily
allies itself with representations of the human figure in order to