fittingness, a certain light we should seek for in vain upon anything real.
For their framework they have around them a veritable architecture--a
tree-architecture--to which those moss-grown balusters, termes, statues,
fountains, are really but accessories. Only, as I gaze upon those windless
afternoons, I find myself always saying to myself involuntarily, "The
evening will be a wet one." The storm is always brooding through the massy
splendour of the trees, above those sun-dried glades or lawns, where
delicate children may be trusted thinly clad; and the secular trees
themselves will hardly outlast another generation.


July 1717.

There has been an exhibition of his pictures in the Hall of the Academy
of Saint Luke; and all the world has been to see.

Yes! Besides that unreal, imaginary light upon these scenes, these persons,
which is pure gift of his, there was a light, a poetry, in those persons
and things themselves, close at hand WE had not seen. He has enabled us to
see it: we are so much the better-off thereby, and I, for one, the better.
The world he sets before us so engagingly has its care for purity, its
cleanly preferences, in what one is to SEE--in the outsides of things-and
there is something, a sign, a memento, at the least, of what makes life
really valuable, even in that. There, is my simple notion, wholly womanly
perhaps, but which I may hold by, of the purpose of the arts.


August 1717.

And yet! (to read my mind, my experience, in somewhat different terms)