83 



illustrations are obvious, line-y in style, poseedt\ lack 

 mystery, imagination, suggestiveness. 



Three things make sculpture, feeling for form, feeling 

 for life, feeling for character. The Greeks are unap- 

 proached in the first two. If the moderns have done any 

 thing it is in the last. Sculpture should take apart like 

 literature, and every fragment should show mastery, 

 vitality, organism. A line of Shakespeare, a passage of 

 Milton, a square foot of Rubens, Veronese, Velasquez 

 proves the master. Modern sculpture will not bear this 

 test. 



American organization is finer for art perhaps than the 

 English but lacks robustness. Hunt is the best exempli 

 fication of this, and does things not equalled there for 

 artistic sensibility, or indeed on the continent. Puri- 

 tanism was not an artistic cast of mind or character. We 

 need temperament. The Irish will give us this, and 

 Germans intellectual industry. Puritanism chilled the 

 blood which needs enrichment. Hawthorne, a subtle im- 

 aginative genius, was morbid, not enough flesh and blood 

 in him. Emerson, a great teacher, is not creative. We 

 are forty millions in a continent. Nature s'.bdues man 

 here, and makes him a mercantile animal. It will be so 

 for a century or more, till the continent fills in. Meantime 

 best forces, the outcome of forty millions, do not keep 

 each other in countenance, are too scattered. No capital 

 exists, school of art, literature, manners.- New York is 

 a mart, Washington a galvanized capital for six months in 

 the year. 



Wo lack passion in poetry. We describe nature, are 

 not near to her. The only sensibility we know of is in 

 Jones Yery's sonnets, and Emerson's early essays. The 

 sonnets are Hebraic in their siugle-mindedness and eleva- 

 tion. They are like voices of nature, purling of brooks 



