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to us no clear perceptions. Shade once introduced restores the equilibrium,—that equilibrium which permits our functions to reassert their powers, and we at once become sensible through its means of every undulation of surface and every variation of contour, in the objects we may examine.

As fulness of light is cheering and elevating to the spirits, so is its opposite conducive to repose, and, in a yet higher degree, to gloom, to tragedy, and through tragedy to sublimity.

It is the study of the maintenance of just balance under varying circumstances between light and shade, and of so using both as to make them subservient to the perfect expression of form, which artists generally understand as the study of chiaro-scuro; and this study will be found of equal importance whether the student's attention is specifically directed to architecture, to sculpture, or to painting.

Another quality abundantly possessed by nature, and manifested in all her noblest works, is variety. Its study will be of infinite value, either to those who are called upon to design—the minority—or to those who hereafter, in wandering away from the domains of art, may be able to give but little specific attention to the riches her realms contain—the majority—but who may yet be the chief users and causers of the artist's inventions and works.

When either class study that endless variety which pervades every work of the Creator, they will find that such variety is in nowise the result of heedlessness, and is in nowise causeless. Its basis will be found to rest upon the endless variety of function which each object in nature has to fulfil. Strong and compact substances in nature will assume one class of form, while fragile and yielding substances will assume another. In vegetation the supporter in all cases asserts its verticality with, as it were, a strong and vigorous bound from the soil which creates it. The climber winds around it in sinuous undulations, falling, where support fails,