324 WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIRDS. 



Florence " beautiful as whited sepulchre ? as though pil- 

 lared aisles and tinsel stars were equal to God's garniture of 

 his earth and sky ! 



The question eternally in the mouth of your muddle- 

 headed Fogy, " How can any one expect to be an artist who 

 does not study art in Italy?" has spoiled many a clever 

 sculptor and painter. 



Pah ! absurd ! Does your true man go first to Eome to 

 study the line of beauty that he may learn to choose a wife ? 

 Does he not rather trust to that perception of symmetry 

 which was educated into him by the graceful freedom of his 

 romping sisters and their bright-haired playmates? And 

 when he has first gratified his own sense of the beautiful in 

 securing his bride then, if he choose, he may take her to 

 Eome, and proudly contrast her with the Madonnas or the 

 Venus ! 



So with the true artist. His art is with him his first love, 

 and concerning her doth he question only nature. When his 

 devotion has at last won her for his Bride his soul Bride 

 then may he go to Italy, and with pride in his conscious 

 heart stand calm-eyed and erect before any marble Titan of 

 them all ! He goes with sobered firmness to compare and 

 study methods, not with lips in the dust of abject humiliation, 

 to imitate forms ! 



Ours is not the period to be exclusively cowed by worn- 

 out conventionalities of any sort. The time has come when 

 man indeed carries "the countenance erect," and dares to 

 look upward with his own eyes for truth dares, in a word, 

 to belong to himself and God, and not to precedent of his 

 fellow-man 1 



It is, indeed, a swift age a swift race, and well may the 

 American swift (or chimney swallow) be said to type many 

 of its chief characteristics. 



Yes, the Yankee is the spiritual swallow as well as the 

 mora l the overcoming speed of his rapid thought has con- 

 quered space, as do the wings of the bird ; he darts through 



