The great masters, were their eyes to fall on our idle words, might haply smile--not contemptuously--on our ignorance of art--but graciously on our knowledge of nature. All we have to do, then, is to learn the theory and practice of art--and assuredly we should forthwith set about doing so, had we any reasonable prospect of living long enough to open an exhibition of pictures from our own easel. As it is, we must be contented with that Gallery, richer than the Louvre, which our imagination has furnished with masterpieces beyond all price or purchase--many of them touched with her own golden finger, the rest the work of high but not superior hands. Imagination, who limns in air, has none of those difficulties to contend with that always beset, and often baffle, artists in oils or waters. At a breath she can modify, alter, obliterate, or restore; at a breath she can colour vacuity with rainbow hues--crown the cliff with its castle--swing the drawbridge over the gulf profound--through a night of woods roll the river along on its moonlit reach--by fragmentary cinctures of mist and cloud, so girdle one mountain that it has the power of a hundred--giant rising above giant, far and wide, as if the mighty multitude, in magnificent and triumphant disorder, were indeed scaling heaven. To speak more prosaically, every true and accepted lover of nature regards her with a painter's as well as a poet's eye. He breaks not down any scene rudely, and with "many an oft-repeated stroke;" but unconsciously and insensibly he transfigures into Wholes, and all day long, from morn till dewy eve, he is preceded, as he walks along, by landscapes retiring in their perfection, one and all of them the birth of his own inspired spirit. All non-essentials do of themselves drop off and disappear--all the characteristics of the scenery range themselves round a centre recognised by the inner sense that cannot err--and thus it is that "beauty pitches her tents before him"--that sublimity companions the pilgrim in the waste wilderness--and grandeur for his sake keeps slowly sailing or settling in the clouds. With such pictures has our Gallery been so thickly hung round for many years, that we have often thought there was not room for one other single frame; yet a vacant space has always been found for every new _chef-d'oeuvre_ that came to add itself to our collection--and the light from that cupola so distributes itself that it falls wherever it is wanted--wherever it is wanted not how tender the shadow! or how solemn the gloom! Why, we are now in Glen-Etive--and sitting with our sketch-book at the mouth of our Tent. Our oft-repeated passionate prayer, "O, for a lodge in some vast wilderness!"