18 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



not the spiritual light and transparency of the real heavens. The 

 aureole encircling the sainted head does not palpitate with the 

 living fire that glows in every sunbeam. Some element there is 

 in nature's beauty that art has failed to catch. It may be, that in 

 attempting to give permanence to impressions which are essen- 

 tially transitory, a certain violence is done to the constitution of 

 things, which we resent even while we admire. The beauty is too 

 permanent. It is not one with the passing, ever-changeful moods 

 of Nature. 



We must not, however, be too exacting and demand the impos- 

 sible. It is not to be expected that the pupil will equal the master. 

 But the question is not unreasonable as to whether Art can not 

 import into her work some of the life and the eternal ebb and flow 

 which characterize that world of beauty which it is her province 

 to attempt to reproduce. Form and color are large elements, but 

 they do not make up nature. There must be light and motion, 

 else the scene is deficient in its chief charms. True, it is impos- 

 sible to realize motion in very fact : the strained muscle and un- 

 stable poise can only suggest it. Nor is it possible, working with 

 marble and canvas, to realize the life and light of the real ether. 

 This is something too subtile to be simulated. But it may be bor- 

 rowed. By giving expression to his conceptions in translucent 

 materials, the artist may so strain and filter the sunlight that it 

 shapes itself at his bidding into such pictures as he will. And the 

 beholder, seated on his bench before it, or perhaps kneeling in a 

 reverential mood, loses himself in this fine vision, and under its 

 influence sends out his thoughts over broader ranges and higher 

 planes. 



I remember distinctly, as a child, the keen pleasure I used to 

 get from a picture-window that faced me during afternoon church. 

 It was a poor thing, artistically — Zaccheus on the bough of a very 

 inadequate-looking sycamore-tree, with a passing multitude of such 

 dimensions as to make tree-climbing seem absolutely superfluous 

 — but in the early winter twilight I found the picture very beau- 

 tiful. When the increasing darkness had softened the group in 

 the foreground into a pleasant harmony, there was a strip of sky 

 along the horizon that sprang into glowing life. And in that bit 

 of light I used to wander over the Judean hills in happy abstrac- 

 tion until the music and the benediction called me back again to 

 the more prosaic life of an American city. 



It is this added element in glass that makes it so fitting a ma- 

 terial for the expression of artistic conceptions. It is a sensitive 

 vehicle for the carriage of a beautiful thought. The material pos- 

 sesses a wealth of the purest color ; it permits in its shading the 

 accurate representation of form, and it furnishes something that 

 marble and canvas do not — large possibilities in the way of light 



