I remember, I think it was about three years ago, a picture which well exemplifies this ideal colouring. It was exhibited at the Institution; it was of a female saint to whom the infant Saviour appears, by P. Veronese. The very excellence of the colouring was in its _natural_ unnaturalness; I say natural, because it was perfectly true to the mystic dream, the saintly vision; a more common natural would have ruined it. No one ever, it is true, saw such a sky--but in a gifted trance it is such as would alone be seen, acknowledged, and remembered as of a heavenly vision. All the colouring was like it, rich and glorifying and unearthly, and imitative of the sanctifying light in old cathedrals. The sky was of very mixed tones and hues of green. The entire scene of the vision was thus hemmed in with the light and glory of holiness, apart from the world's ideas and employments. Why should modern painters be afraid of thus venturing into the ideal of colouring? Never was there a greater mistake, than that the common natural can represent the ideal. Wilkie with all his acuteness and good sense was bewildered with a notion of their union, and thought his sketches from the Holy Land would assist him in painting sacred subjects; whereas the truth is, that the very realities before his eyes would unpoeticise his whole mind; instead of trusting to his feeling, to his visionary dream, he would begin to doubt, as he did, what should be the exact costume, if his figures should stand or sit as Asiatics. As we are removed from events by time, so should we be by thought; we pass over an extensive region, and the clouds of days and of nights pursue us out of it, and we look back upon it in our memory, as under another light--the land itself, by distance and by memory making it a part of our minds, more than of our vision, becomes fabulous; it is no longer one for common language, but for song; and so the pencil that would paint it must be dipped in the colours of poetry. Memory glazes, to use a technical word, every scene. "The resounding sea and the shadowy mountains are far between us," as Homer says, and those fabulous territories that we love to revisit in the dreams of poetic night. There are no muses with their golden harps on Highgate Hill; nor would the painter that would paint them be over wise to expect a glimpse of their white feet on the real Parnassus.[11] As to nature in art, we make too much of a little truth, neglecting the greater. It is not every creation that is revealed to the eye; even to adore and to admire properly, we must imagine a more beautiful than we see. The inventions of genius are but discoveries in regions of a higher nature. "God's work invisible, Not undiscover'd, their true stamp impress On thought, creation's mirror, wherein do dwell His unattained wonders numberless."