also they are much easier to draw. When a cow came slouching
by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have drawn it;
but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds. So I drew
the soul of the cow; which I saw there plainly walking before me
in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver, and had
seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all the beasts. But
though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the landscape,
it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best out
of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about the
old poets who lived before Wordsworth, and were supposed not to care
very much about Nature because they did not describe it much.

They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills;
but they sat on the great hills to write it. They gave out much
less about Nature, but they drank in, perhaps, much more. They
painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding
snow, at which they had stared all day. They blazoned the shields
of their paladins with the purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets.
The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live
green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of forgotten
skies became the blue robes of the Virgin. The inspiration went
in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo.

. . . . .

But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on the brown paper, it began
to dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that a
most exquisite and essential chalk, behind. I searched all my pockets,
but I could not find any white chalk. Now, those who are acquainted
with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art