324 
WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIRDS. 
Florence " — ^beautiful as wMted sepulclire ? — as tliougli pil- 
lared aisles and tinsel stars were equal to God's garniture of 
Ms earth and sky I 
The question eternally in the mouth of your muddle- 
lieaded 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 Kome 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 
Yenus ! 
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 — 
ihen 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 ! 
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 
moral' — the overcoming speed of his rapid thought has con- 
quered space, as do the wings of the bird ; he darts through 
