85 



must render itself to the world and not be of a caste or 

 mystery. 



It cannot be too much insisted on, art does not depend 

 upon subject. Rembrandt saw subject everywhere, and 

 transmuted the dust to gold. We are getting nearer to 

 nature in all things, life, literature, law, art, manners, re- 

 ligion, sloughing off' the accretions of centuries. Science 

 is lending a powerful hand. The age is her's. The Amer- 

 ican loves adornment, which is a kind of art, and is willing 

 to spend for it. American ladies' instinct for dress is 

 conspicuous while the English are clumsy at it. Our 

 houses are more neatly constructed than in the Provinces. 



Allston was the greatest artist we have produced, a man 

 cast in the mould of the old masters but missing his time. 

 Like Coleridge as poet, he was potential ly great. Land- 

 seer, the greatest English artist of our generation, and 

 the only one of genius, is best seen in prints for his paint- 

 ing is chalky and thin. The English live among animals 

 and should do them well as the Greeks did the human 

 form which they constantly saw, and the Venetians were 

 inspired by the lagune around them, and the vicinity and 

 intercourse of the East. 



The aesthetic is born in man as early as the religious 

 or intellectual. The savage no sooner begins to beat his 

 neighbor's brains out but he carves his club. He paints 

 his own body for beauty or terror, but it requires a new 

 birth to know beauty intimately as Wordsworth, Shelley, 

 Blake, knew it. We must go behind the conventional, 

 recover the "innocency of the eye," "strip the veil of 

 familiarity from things." Artists interpret, poets make 

 us know it. But among poets and artists there are the 

 supersensuous, and the describers merely. Those' who 

 have insight and ideality, and spiritual imagination, and 

 those who never get at the heart, the core, the soul of 



