102 THE DREARY AND DESOLATE. 



as by music. But there are words in every language, 

 even in our own unmusical tongue, which are capable, by 

 their sweetness of tone, of powerfully exciting the imagi- 

 nation. Such materials were used with rare skill by 

 this singular and extraordinary genius, who considered 

 the art of using language so as to produce the greatest 

 effect no less worthy of study than the arts of painting 

 and sculpture. 



There is nothing positively agreeable in dreary or deso- 

 late scenery, yet the sentiment it inspires is associated 

 with a beneficent law of our nature that causes a little 

 pathos and a little melancholy to heighten the pleasures 

 of life. We have all, at certain times, been deeply affect- 

 ed by scenes of dreariness and mystery, and felt from the 

 sweetness and sadness that are blended with them that 

 no merely beautiful scene could awaken the same amount 

 of pleasurable emotion. Who has not felt the charms of 

 a wide solitary plain, of a dark forest, and of the deep 

 ghostly shadows of night on the hills ? There is nothing 

 that comes from a mere view of nature that will compare 

 with the luxury of this sentiment, and it seems to me to 

 have been less appreciated by painters than by musicians. 

 I have never seen a picture which equalled the sublimer 

 strains of music, like certain passages in the works of 

 Beethoven, in the power of inspiring these sensations. 

 But the ear is a more emotional organ than the eye, 

 and perhaps a higher order of genius is required in the 

 painter than in the musician to produce equal emotional 

 effects. 



We delight to witness the phenomena of Nature under 

 aspects that present her to our imaginations as a gentle 

 sympathizer or seeming partner in our afflictions. Hence 

 autumn is the favorite season of poets, because it emblem- 

 izes sorrow, and fills the lap of Nature with dead leaves 

 which she strews over the graves of flowers ; and we love 



