IN HIS inspiring and provocative reflections on mountains and their effects on the psyche, Thomas Starr King spoke of the importance of learning to see. He wrote:

To learn to see is one of the chief objects of education and life. First as infants we learn to push the world off from ourselves, and to disentangle ourselves as personalities from a mesh of sensations. Then we gain power to detect and measure distance ; then to perceive forms and colors; and at last to relate objects quickly and properly to each other by a sweep of the eye. And this process is crowned by the poetic perception of general beauty, in which our humanity flowers out, and by which we obtain possession of the world. ” The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their wairanty-deeds give no title.” [Emerson] The general beauty of the world is a perpetual revelation, and if we are impervious to its appeal and charm, a large district of our nature is curtained off from the Creator, “and wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.”

As soon, therefore, as we become educated to see, and just in proportion to our skill in seeing, we get joy. The surprise to the senses in first looking upon a noble landscape, ought to show itself in childlike animation. The truly cultivated perception is chiefly conditioned by the recovery of the innocence of the eye. Forms and colors look as fresh to the truly trained intellect, as they do to the uncritical sense of the little child that chases its golden-winged butterfly without any competence to measure the horizon, or any feeling that it is pursuing its fluttering enticement unroofed in immensity. Mr. Ruskin tells us, in his work on the Elements of Drawing, that every highly accomplished artist has reduced himself, in dealing with the colors of a landscape, as nearly as possible to the condition of infantine sight. So that perpetual surprise and enthusiasm are signs of healthy and tutored taste.

And let us not forget that the charm which the person discerns who feels rapture amid such scenes as Winnipiseogee offers, is not illusive. It is founded on fact. The man who sees the most beauty in that landscape, deals with the facts as demonstrably as if he were engaged all day in dipping buckets of water from its treasury, or shovelling sand and felling birches on its shores. Agassiz finds marvel enough for a month’s study, and for unbounded admiration, in a single grasshopper from a field on one of its islands. Jackson sees quarries of truth in the direction and dip of the mountain chains that border the Lake, where a common eye detects nothing but blank bareness of ledge, or a slope of ordinary forest at a certain angle. Mantell might unfold from a pebble stone at the foot of Ossipee the history of the globe for a hundred thousand years. And just as these men deal with facts more thoroughly than the purblind vision which overlooks these wonders, so the artistic eye deals more faithfully with facts, and with more facts, too, when it delights in the beautiful curves and windings and fringes of the lakes, islands, and shores, enjoys the shape into which the substance of Chocorua is sculptured, and finds the breezy or the sleeping water of the Lake, a fountain-head of joy for a tired mind and a wilted frame. A man that is insensible to beauty, is blind to facts. Goethe tells us that he once had a present of a basket of fruit, and was in such raptures at the sight of the loveliness of form and hue which it presented, that he could not persuade himself  “to pluck off a single berry or to remove a single peach or fig.” Were not the bloom and the symmetry as truly facts, as the weight and juices of the products which the basket held? If half a dozen pictures could be seen in an Art gallery of New York or Boston, with perspective as accurate, with tints as tender, with hues as vivid and modest, with reflections as cunningly caught, with mountain-slopes as delicately pencilled, as the Lake exhibits in reality, fifty times in the summer weeks, what pride there would be in the artistic ability in the country, and what interest and joy in seeing such masterpieces from mortal hands! A great many, no doubt, would be willing to spend profusely, to own one 0r two such pictures, colored on less than a dozen square feet of canvas, who do not estimate very highly the privilege of looking upon the real water-colors of the Creator, of which every triumph of a human artist is only an illusion.

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Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

The excerpt from Starr contains a quotation in its first paragraph, namely this one — 

The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title. 

— which is from Emerson’s Nature, Chapter I. Starr must have made his attribution earlier than in the portion of his discourse that you excerpt. 

A whole school of art, the Hudson Valley school of painters, came out of this peculiarly American sensibility to transcendental meaning in the landscape although the impulse may be traced across the Atlantic to Wordsworth and the other first-generation Anglophone Romantics. Thank you for bringing Starr to the attention of us forgetful modern people.

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