for the spirit that rules now rules evermore. How like a god sits she
brooding over the world, announcing her laws by blows and knocks, by
agonies and convulsions, by the mouths of wise men, affirming that as the
sowing so also is the harvest. And there is no alleviation, no palliation.
She heeds no prayers, no sighs; those who fall must raise themselves; the
sick must of their own force recover or perish. When thus she has set us
upon our legs everything works for us, and the sun and moon are great
lamps for our enlightenment, and men and women leaves of a wondrous book.
Then, imperceptibly to us, in these snows and blossoms and fruits annually
all history is rewritten, and the honest man who knows nothing of Greece
and Rome derives from the swelling trees and the bending sky the same
subtle infusion of heroism and nobility that is the vitality of history.
The vice of our mode of education is that we do not regard life from an
eternal point. We want magnanimity and truth, not the names of those who
have been magnanimous and true; and I see not why nature to-day does not
offer to me all the grandeur of character that has illustrated any period.
Men and nature and art all seek to say the same thing. Could we search
deeply enough, I doubt not we should find all matter to be one substance;
and could we appreciate the worth of every art and every landscape and
man, they would be identical. As I am a better man, the more soluble is
the great outspreading riddle of nature, and the more distinct and full
the delicate grace of art. As an old, quaint divine said of fate and
free-will, they are two converging lines which of necessity must somewhere
unite, though our human vision does not see the point; so all mysteries
are radii, and could we follow one implicitly, then we have found the
centre of all. Therefore the best critic of art is the man whose life has
been hid with God in nature; and therefore the triumph of art is complete
when birds peck at the grapes.

I felt this yesterday while looking at Cole's paintings. Each picture of