Explore "Death of the Laird's Jock" by Walter Scott on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
You have asked me, sir, to point out a subject for the pencil, and I feel the difficulty of complying with your request, although I am not certainly unaccustomed to literary composition, or a total stranger to the stores of history and tradition, which afford the best copies for the painter's art. But although SICUT PICTURA POESIS is an ancient and undisputed axiom -- although poetry and painting both address themselves to the same object of exciting the human imagination, by presenting to it pleasing or sublime images of ideal scenes -- yet the one conveying itself through the ears to the understanding, and the other applying itself only to the eyes, the subjects which are best suited to the bard or tale-teller are often totally unfit for painting, where the artist must present in a single glance all that his art has power to tell us.
The artist can neither recapitulate the past nor intimate the future.