"I shall be greatly obliged to you," she said, returning it, "for I have had no one to help me since I left school, except a book called _Modern Painters_, which I think has the most beautiful things in it I ever read, but which I lay down every now and then with a kind of despair, as if I never could do anything worth doing. How long the next volume is in coming! Do you know the author, Mr. Percivale?" "I wish I did. He has given me much help. I do not say I can agree with everything he writes; but when I do not, I have such a respect for him that I always feel as if he must be right whether he seems to me to be right or not. And if he is severe, it is with the severity of love that will speak only the truth." This last speech fell on my ear like the tone of a church bell. "That will do, my friend," thought I. But I said nothing to interrupt. By this time he had laid the portfolio open on the side-table, and placed a chair in front of it for my daughter. Then seating himself by her side, but without the least approach to familiarity, he began to talk to her about her drawings, praising, in general, the feeling, but finding fault with the want of nicety in the execution--at least so it appeared to me from what I could understand of the conversation. "But," said my daughter, "it seems to me that if you get the feeling right, that is the main thing." "No doubt," returned Mr. Percivale; "so much the main thing that any imperfection or coarseness or untruth which interferes with it becomes of the greatest consequence." "But can it really interfere with the feeling?" "Perhaps not with most people, simply because most people observe so badly that their recollections of nature are all blurred and blotted and indistinct, and therefore the imperfections we are speaking of do not affect them. But with the more cultivated it is otherwise. It is for them you ought to work, for you do not thereby lose the others. Besides, the feeling is always intensified by the finish, for that belongs to the feeling too, and must, I should think, have some influence even where it is not noted." "But is it not a hopeless thing to attempt the finish of nature?" "Not at all; to the degree, that is, in which you can represent anything else of nature. But in this drawing now you have no representative of, nothing to hint at or recall the feeling of the exquisiteness of nature's finish. Why should you not at least have drawn a true horizon-line there? Has the absolute truth of the meeting of sea and sky nothing to do with the feeling which such a landscape produces? I should have thought you would have learned that, if anything, from Mr. Ruskin."