I once wrote for a monthly magazine an out-door paper--a summer study, intended to enliven the reader's feeling rather than enlighten his understanding--and timed the production of it so that it should appear during the winter. The thought that it would be read only by bright firesides cheered me not a little in the writing. The editor, endeavoring to propitiate that thoughtless creature, "the general reader"--in matters of art but another name for "the general prejudice" or "the general ignorance"--notified me in January that he would prefer to hold the contribution till summer came again, when it would be regarded as "more appropriate, and just the thing to be read under green arbors and spreading beeches." I was glad to know that he thought it just the thing to be read anywhere, but nevertheless resolved to lay before the general reader, or the general prejudice, or the general ignorance, my little protest. Most people are aware that the effects of Nature are so evanescent that the painter generally makes his study as if he were observing an eclipse. Down go a few strokes; into the spaces go notes, signs, symbols--all in the shortest kind of shorthand. Six months afterward, when the picture is made amid other scenes, the sketch and notes are used, to be sure, so far as they go, but the artist uses his good memory more. All people know that a book or canvas gives us not Nature, but an interpretation, a translation, a few selections, a memory of Nature. If the work be good, we are glad to abstract our eyes, for the time, from all else. We can do this best when the scene from which the work was studied is shut farthest away from sight. Summer landscapes themselves are one thing, and we enjoy them in summer: such landscapes utilized--they cannot be reproduced--by art, are another thing, and these we enjoy at the winter fireside, when the eye sees nothing without except leaden clouds and effacing snow. Not even the average American would take a landscape-painting under his arm if he wished to get the good of it, and go set it up in the glare of an open harvestfield or in the darkness of a deep wood, although these objects may have made the picture. He would enjoy Nature just as well, no doubt, during such a proceeding, but would he get the good of art? What would the painter do to the critic or buyer who subjected his work to such a test? Poison him at the very least. And this is what the literary artist should complain of, rather than desire, at the hands of an editor. He should not want the little bit that he selected, narrowed, intensified, idealized, and then imperfectly transcribed from memory, brought out and set up before a reader whose eye is filled at every glance with the overpowering and inexhaustible realities of Nature herself.