To the average man, who has seen a dozen oil paintings, a hundred photographs, a thousand pictures in the illustrated journals, and a couple of panoramas of Niagara, the word-painting of a waterfall is tedious.
An American friend of mine, a cultured gentleman, who loved poetry well enough for its own sake, told me that he had obtained a more correct and more satisfying idea of the Lake district from an eighteenpenny book of photographic views than from all the works of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth put together.

I also remember his saying concerning this subject of scenery in literature, that he would thank an author as much for writing an eloquent description of what he had just had for dinner.
But this was in reference to another argument; namely, the proper province of each art.

My friend maintained that just as canvas and colour were the wrong mediums for story telling, so word-painting was, at its best, but a clumsy method of conveying impressions that could much better be received through the eye.
As regards the question, there also lingers in my memory very distinctly a hot school afternoon.

The class was for English literature, and the proceedings commenced with the reading of a certain lengthy, but otherwise unobjectionable, poem.

The author's name, I am ashamed to say, I have forgotten, together with the title of the poem.