And accordingly, the capacities of both gatherer and receiver being limited, the object is to make _everything that you offer helpful_ and precious. If you give one grain of weight too much, so as to increase fatigue without profit, or bulk without value--that added grain is hurtful; if you put one spot or one syllable out of its proper place, that spot or syllable will be destructive--how far destructive it is almost impossible to tell: a misplaced touch may sometimes annihilate the labour of hours. Nor are any of us prepared to understand the work of any great master, till we feel this, and feel it as distinctly as we do the value of arrangement in the notes of music. Take any noble musical air, and you find, on examining it, that not one even of the faintest or shortest notes can be removed without destruction to the whole passage in which it occurs; and that every note in the passage is twenty times more beautiful so introduced, than it would have been if played singly on the instrument. Precisely this degree of arrangement and relation must exist between every touch [Footnote: Literally. I know how exaggerated this statement sounds; but I mean it,--every syllable of it.--See Appendix IV.] and line in a great picture. You may consider the whole as a prolonged musical composition: its parts, as separate airs connected in the story; its little bits and fragments of colour and line, as separate passages or bars in melodies; and down to the minutest note of the whole--down to the minutest _touch_,--if there is one that can be spared--that one is doing mischief. Remember therefore always, you have two characters in which all greatness of art consists:--First, the earnest and intense seizing of natural facts; then the ordering those facts by strength of human intellect, so as to make them, for all who look upon them, to the utmost serviceable, memorable, and beautiful. And thus great art is nothing else than the type of strong and noble life; for, as the ignoble person, in his dealings with all that occurs in the world about him, first sees nothing clearly,--looks nothing fairly in the face, and then allows himself to be swept away by the trampling torrent, and unescapable force, of the things that he would not foresee, and could not understand: so the noble person, looking the facts of the world full in the face, and fathoming them with deep faculty, then deals with them in unalarmed intelligence and unhurried strength, and becomes, with his human intellect and will, no unconscious nor insignificant agent, in consummating their good, and restraining their evil. Thus in human life you have the two fields of rightful toil for ever distinguished, yet for ever associated; Truth first--plan or design, founded thereon; so in art, you have the same two fields for ever distinguished, for ever associated; Truth first--plan, or design, founded thereon.