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across this passage spoken to the students of Johns Hopkins Uni- 
versity, from a poetic point of view, by an American poet— 
poet of the salt-sea marshes—Sidney Lanier: ‘‘ Cannot one say 
to the young artist, whether working in stone, in color, in tone, or 
in character-forms of the novel: So far from dreading that your 
moral purpose will interfere with your beautiful creation, go forward 
in the clear conviction that unless you are suffused—soul and body, 
one might say—with that moral purpose that finds its largest expres- 
sion in love ; that is, the love of all things in their proper relation ; 
unless you are suffused with this love, do not dare to meddle with 
beauty ; in a word, unless you are suffused with true wisdom, good- 
ness and love, abandon the hope that the ages will accept youas an 
artist.’” Would that Lanier could have lived longer to have out- 
lived some superficial defects of style, to have chastened his luxuri- 
ant imagination, and to have carried out his own noble theory of 
art ! 
Thus art has a vital beauty belonging to divine things. 
The total sensualization of art characterizing a great deal of our 
modern art, forgets the truth that, though art lies partly in the 
sphere of the senses, in which ‘‘ ideas take their plastic embodi- 
ment,’’ it has a spiritual source which makes the artist a priest of 
the divine. ‘‘ The artist paints with the brain and not with the 
hands,’’ said Michael Angelo contrary to Courbet’s saying. 
The noble young science of archeology, which has made such 
marvelous progress of late, but which, after all, is the serviceable 
handmaid of art and not art itself, this science, so helpful to art, 
so indefatigable in its research, so interested, and rightly, in the 
orientation of every exhumed stone, and so furiously combative in 
the claims of space occupied by the orchestra and proscenium of a 
Greek theatre—notwithstanding its brilliant discoveries, has served 
imperceptibly and unconsciously to set learning before beauty and 
thus obscure or render secondary the intrinsic idea of art. 
Looking at these four principles, viz., that art has its foundation 
in an innate spiritual susceptibility which corresponds to outwaid 
objects and forms; that art is the interpretation of the idea, beauty 
and perfection of nature; that art finds its laws primarily in nature; 
and that art in-its source is divine; we may judge somewhat, from 
these rough pillars, what is the vast scope of art, how it reaches into 
heaven as well as makes our own thought higher, our life sweeter 
and this earth lovelier. And when we come to consider further 
