Where the human form is the theme, the aim must of course be to give its typical perfection. No naturalist describes the defects of his specimens, though it may happen that all are imperfect. Comparatively few persons ever saw our robin in the plumage in which it is always described. Only in early spring, not very commonly then, is the black of the head and tail seen pure. But no one hesitates to call this the true color. The sculptor does not reproduce the peculiarities of his model, but aims to give ideal form as the most natural form of man. But in Painting, and especially in Landscape, it seems less easy to fix upon any ideal, not only from the multifariousness of the details, but, above all, from the elusiveness of the standard. We might agree upon an ideal of human beauty, but hardly upon the ideal of anything else. The sophist in the Hippias Major was prepared to define the beauty of a maiden, or of a mare; but he was confounded when it was required that the beauty of a pipkin should be deducible from the same principle, and yet worse when it was shown to involve that a wooden spoon was more beautiful than a gold one. What you see in the woods and mountains depends on what you go for and what you carry with you. We may go to them as to a quarry or a wood-pile, or for pleasantness,--the cool spring and the plane-tree shade, as the ancients did,--or to see fine trees, waterfalls, mountains. To many persons the beauty of any scene is measured by its abundance in such _specimens_ of streams, mountains, waterfalls, etc. Of course the connection is demonstrable enough: one collocation of features is more readily suggestive of beauty than another. We expect to find the scenery of a hill-country more attractive than a sand-desert. But comparing a landscape with a statue, or even Painting generally with Sculpture, the connection between a happy effect and any definite arrangement of lines is much looser, and depends on the combination rather than the ingredients. It is in every one's experience that an accidental light, or even an accidental susceptibility, will impart to the meagrest landscape--a bare marsh, a scraggy hill-pasture--a charm of which the separate features, or the whole, at another time, give no hint. Often mere bareness, openness, absence of objects, will arouse a deeper feeling than the most famous scenes. We learn from such experiences that the difference between one patch of earth and another is wholly superficial, and indicates not so much anything in it as a greater or less dulness in us. The celebrated panoramas and points of view are not the favorite haunts of great painters. They do not need to travel far for their subjects. Mr. Ruskin tells us that Turner did not paint the high Alps, nor the _cumulus_, the grandest form of cloud. Calame gives us the nooks and lanes, the rocks and hills, of Switzerland, rather than the high peaks; Lambinet, an apple-orchard, a