All eyes ought habitually to see the sun in his rising and setting the spectacle is needed both for body and soul. "Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge." But when we are shut out from this speech, we go ignorant of this knowledge. How long.a journey the Queen of Sheba made to see Solomon! Yet, his glory was outrivalled by the lilies of the field. And since. the Lord spake of His lilies once, the lilies evermore speak of their Lord. What a magnificent song of Nature is the Psalmist's! "Praise the Lord, fire and hail; snow and vapor; stormy wind fulfilling his word; mountains and all hills; fruitful trees and all cedars; creeping things and flying fowl. . . . His glory is above the heavens and earth. . . Praise ye the Lord."

By-and-by, looking at our watches, it was time for the train. We carried off with us the best part of the farm— its master. A plain man, plainer than his neighbors, with a face as kindly as a child's and a heart as simple, he trudged with stick in hand away from his happy fields, not to see them again for six days. When a man owns a paradise, it is a self-denial to live in it only one day in a week. But there is hard work to be done in the world, and this is one of the men who must do it. What if all men did theirs as faithfully! And for his work's sake, he will be remembered long after his two summer-day companions shall be under the grass and forgotten.

August 27, 1863.

THE PICTURE OF THE PROCLAMATION.

M

EASURING about fifteen feet by nine, Mr. Carpenter's ample canvas contains eight lifesize figures—namely, President Lincoln, and Secretaries Chase, Stanton, Seward, Welles, Smith, Blair, and Bates-assembled in the chamber in which, since Jackson's day, the Cabinet-meetings have always been held. Here is the old green-papered wall; the hard-featured walnut table; the leg-worn and threadbare cusihoned chairs; the cheaply-carpeted floor, strewn with portfolios, maps, and books; and the old-fashioned chandelier, half-hiding the portrait of Old Hickory's thin, courageous face. At the head of the table (for "where Macgregor sits is head of the table"), is President Lincoln, the central figure of the group; at his right hand, Chase and Stanton; at his left, the other ministers; some sitting, others standing. The time is July, 1862, when Mr. Lincoln first announced to his counsellors his intention to proclaim Emancipation. He has just read aloud the original draft that lies before him, and is listening to a suggestion from the Secretary of State-who appears better in a picture than in some other capacities as a cabinet minister. After this meeting (as we hardly need say) came the Proclamations of September 22, 1862, and January 1, 1863.

As a fundamental canon of criticism, we hold that a work of art should be judged, not only for its skill, but its motive-not only for technical excellence, but sug

gestive meaning. The fine arts are so intrinsically noble that they should never be squandered on unworthy subjects. The old masters devoted their art almost wholly to churchly uses. They were nearly all animated with religious enthusiasm. Some of them never painted except in a devout frame of mind. Out of such moral quickenings naturally sprang fine works of the imagination; for the imagination and the moral nature are so intimately co-related that they act upon each other with great suddenness and power; what fires the one, kindles the other; and when both join their individual moods into a common heat, they produce in a gifted mind a noble fervor of constructive activity-an intense tendency toward picturesque and dramatic expression. It is during this conjunction of faculties that the highest themes of literature and art are caught and fixed for ever by pen or brush. And as the highest works of literature and art spring out of these mental states in the author or artist, so the highest function of literature and art is to awaken similar mental states in the reader or spectator. The man who is himself inwardly awakened by these mysterious chords striking their solemn music through his mind, and who, at the same time, has the cunning craft to awaken like ecstacies in other men, is the great artist, the great poet, the great orator. It is easy, therefore, to set up a true standard for the relative ranking of what claim to be great works of art. Such works are truly great only according to the degree in which, like ancient questioners at the oracles, they evoke these highest responses from the human soul. This was the secret of the mediæval masters. They disdained any meaner mission for their art. The object of Corregio, and of Raphael, and of Fra Angelico, was not to win a sweet

breath blown from courtly connoisseurs, but to elicit the noblest emotions possible to the human heart. Of course, the desire of fame had its full and legitimate share in rousing the artist to his utmost of genius; but this very desire of fame, in the truest and highest uses for which God has set it in the soul, is a high and heavenward passion, and not the base and selfish greed into which it too often is degraded. What Longfellow wrote of one of these ancient worthies, is true of nearly all the rest.

"Here, where art was still religion, and in simple reverent heart,

Lived and labored Albrect Durer."

It is touching to read, in the lives of these men, how they refused pay even for their master-pieces-accepting only a bare equivalent for their canvas and pigments, giving the labor of their cunning hands, and the zeal of their fiery souls, as free offerings to God and the church. What wonder, therefore, that the glory of such artists has become in history greater than the glory of kings!

Our American art, on the contrary, with some signal exceptions, lacks this inspiration, and is mercenary, frivolous, subservient to fashion, unleavened with moral meaning, poor, dry, and barren, and therefore eclipsed by the past and unpromising for the future. Some of our artists (pitifully too few!) have worthily applied their genius to higher and holier themes than the trifles which now pass current among us as works of art. But protracted observation has led us to the conviction that American artists, while far from being men of merely ordinary gifts, and while not a few are of undisputed genius, nevertheless as a class fall short of their best possible powers simply through lack of that spiritual quickening which alone can fully arouse the intellectual faculties. "No man is great," said Cicero," without the divine afflatus." No artist can

climb to the top of his art except he be lifted by God's hand. No worker works to his full ability, unless in his work he is brooded by the Illumining Spirit-as St. Gregory is pictured in the act of dictating his homilies under the wing of the Holy Dove.

Unlike the great masters, who were thoroughly imbued with the spirit of their day and generation, our own painters are especially remiss and oblivious concerning the great issues of the present age-forgetting that this is the only age to which, for the most part, their works will ever appeal. It was fully a year after the outbreak of our civil war-a war which was the outgrowth of a great moral controversy-before our artists (as a class) showed by any hint in their works that they felt the patriotic spirit of the times. When, two winters ago, Gray put the negro on canvas, exhibiting him as a human being to a fashionable audience in Fifth Avenue; and when Ward, at the same time, modelled a chain-breaking slave in an attitude of heroic manhood; not only were there connoisseurs who curled their lips, but many artists themselves joined the contemners-proving how little worthy they were of that true knight-errantry of art whose high duty it is to champion justice against tyranny-to inspire men with generosity and nobleness-to sweeten and purify the faith of mankind.

As in the Madonna of Ingres the kneeling king offers his crown and sceptre as reverent gifts to the Holy Virgin whom he serves, so art fulfils its highest mission in offering itself to the service of whatever is good, noble, true, and pure-disdaining to circumscribe itself within any sphere less comprehensive, or to content itself with any service less illustrious.

We have turned our pen into this strain because we