AQUILIUS.—There is; and as our subject is art, I should say such scenery is more valuable for what it suggests, than for what it actually represents in the painter’s mirror. In fact, nature offers with both hands: it requires a nice discretion to tell which hand holds the true treasure. She may purposely show you the ornament to deceive. “So may the outward shows be least themselves, The world is still deceived with ornament.” It was the leaden casket, in which was hidden the perfect beauty of Portia; there was the choice, and made with a judgment that won the prize, and took the inheritance of Belmont. “You that choose not by the _view_, Chance as fair, and choose as true.” Would you take away from landscape painters the high privilege of genius?—invention—which you allow to historical painters? You do this, if you do not grant to the fullest extent the suggestive character of nature. The musician takes music from the air, which is his raw material; the conception, which works from mere sounds the perfect mystery of power, to shake, to raise, and melt to pity and to love the whole soul, belongs to the mind. And so, for the more perfect work of landscape, the mind must add of its own immortal store, the keeper and dispenser of which is genius. CURATE.—You would raise landscape painting to the dignity of a creative, from the lower grade of an imitative art. AQUILIUS.—I would do more; I would make it creative, not only in things like, but, to speak boldly at once, in things unlike itself; but, nevertheless, perfectly congenial; and to be adopted as a recognised mark of submission of all matter to mind, which alone is privileged to diffuse itself over and into all nature, and to animate it with a soul—life; and when that is superadded, and then only, is the sympathy complete between external nature and ourselves. I care not for art that is not creative, that does not construct poetry. From all that is most soft and tender, to all that is most great and rugged, from the sweet to the awful and sublime, there is in all art, whether it be of landscape or historical, (which embraces the poetical), a dominion bounded only by the limitations of the original power with which genius is gifted. Why may there not be a Michael Angelo for trees, as for the human form? Nay, I verily believe, that those landscapes would have the greatest fascination, where there would be, in fact, the greatest unlikeness to usually recognised nature, both in form and colour, provided one part were in keeping with another, so as to bring the whole within the idea of the natural; and where the conception is clearly expressed, and is worthy the dignity of feeling. Hence, suggestive nature is the best nature. We want not height and magnitude, vast distances: if we have the science of form and colour, the materials need not be vast, let them only be suggestive.