This is Invention; we have not moved a step through the picture but at
the will of the Artist. He invented the chain which we have followed,
link by link, through every emotion, assimilating many into one; and
this is the secret by which he prepared us, without exciting horror,
to contemplate the struggle of mortal agony.

This too is Art; and the highest art, when thus the awful power,
without losing its character, is tempered, as it were, to our
mysterious desires. In the work of Ostade, we see the same inventive
power, no less effective, though acting through the medium of the
humblest materials.

We have now exhibited two pictures, and by two painters who may be
said to stand at opposite poles. And yet, widely apart as are their
apparent stations, they are nevertheless tenants of the same ground,
namely, actual nature; the only difference being, that one is
the sovereign of the purely physical, the other of the moral and
intellectual, while their common medium is the catholic ground of the
imagination.

We do not fear either skeptical demur or direct contradiction, when
we assert that the imagination is as much the medium of the homely
Ostade, as of the refined Raffaelle. For what is that, which has just
wrapped us as in a spell when we entered his humble cottage,--which,
as we wandered through it, invested the coarsest object with a
strange charm? Was it the _truth_ of these objects that we there
acknowledged? In part, certainly, but not simply the truth that
belongs to their originals; it was the truth of his own individual
mind superadded to that of nature, nay, clothed upon besides by his
imagination, imbuing it with all the poetic hues which float in the