I. EARLY RENAISSANCE 41

have put a brush and pallet, it cannot do anything with them but imitate a piece of wood. It cannot colour, it has no ideas of colour; it cannot draw, it has no ideas of form; it cannot caricature, it has no ideas of humour. It is incapable of anything beyond knots. All its achievement, the entire result of the daily application of its imagination and immortality, is to be such a piece of texture as the sun and dew are sucking up out of the muddy ground, and weaving together, far more finely, in millions of millions of growing branches over every rood of waste woodland and shady hill.

§ 47. But what is to be done, the reader asks, with men who are capable of nothing else than this? Nay, they may be capable of everything else, for all we know, and what we are to do with them I will try to say in the next chapter; but meanwhile, one word more touching the higher principles of action in this matter, from which we have descended to those of expediency. I trust that some day the language of Types will be more read and understood by us than it has been for centuries; and when this language, a better one than either Greek or Latin, is again recognised amongst us, we shall find, or remember, that as the other visible elements of the universe-its air, its water, and its flame-set forth, in their pure energies, the life-giving, purifying, and sanctifying influences of the Deity upon His creatures, so the earth, in its purity, sets forth His eternity and HIS TRUTH. I have dwelt above on the historical language of stones; let us not forget this, which is their theological language; and, as we would not wantonly pollute the fresh waters when they issue forth in their clear glory from the rock, nor stay the mountain winds into pestilential stagnancy, nor mock the sunbeams with artificial and ineffective light; so let us not, by our own base and barren falsehoods, replace the crystalline strength and burning colour of the earth from which we were born and to which we must return; the earth which, like our own bodies, though dust in its degradation, is full of splendour when

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