A drop of water mirrors the illimitable heavens, and so does the rational creature image the Eternal Reason. It is the height of all perfections to give being to the same perfections in kind, however different in measure. Indeed, were it not for the analogy between the human and the Divine artist, we might never have been able to apprehend the Creator at all.

Passing from the capabilities of man, we find that he has strong instincts and motives pointing to art. So imperative are these, we must recognize every human work, that has not a wrong purpose, as verily, though indirectly, the work of the Great Cause, everything from the highest to the lowest transformations of nature. The absurd idea that circumstances and wants have developed life from simple to complex organisms, from monads to men and birds, that external necessities gave gradual protrusion and shape to arm, finger, or wing, is quite rational when applied to man's artificial extensions of himself. A house, in its essential parts, is as much an outgrowth of man, as the shell is of a fish; and so far as the tenement is conformed to his national, sectional, or individual need and taste, it is his generic and specific shell. Magnifying-glasses, to help imperfect vision, were as truly intended by Nature, as that her eagles should be farsighted. She claims dress as her own invention, when she makes civilized people delicately surfaced like flowers, and wild men furred like apes. The external inducements of art are too plain to excuse remark. There is no useful thing, or beautiful even, that is not an attempt of creation's lord to bring the outward world into harmony with himself. He is thrown into the world, a drifting, tender creature, like a young barnacle, and must attach himself to the soil, and surround himself with his crustaceous covering. Nay, the soft mollusk, man, having progressed far beyond the mud cabin of a cirriped, rejoices in a civilization more like the wonderful beauty of a nautilus, with its various apparatus, and sails of gauze.

But it is an inner necessity, no less than an outward one, to construct, to shape, to perfect. The child must have a hammer and knife, or, if he have toys, he can never arrange them satisfactorily; and whenever, in after-life, the disposition to do, to make, ceases, it is because some form of evil over

powers it. And as to the indolent animalism of savage nations, nothing else than the roving habit induced by the freedom and loneliness of a thinly populated country overcomes the impulses of art. So far as his wandering life favored it, the aboriginal of this country had his arts, many of them exquisitely adapted to the ends proposed. Had half a million of Indians, ages ago, been restricted to Manhattan Island, as their only home, doubtless they would have built up a sort of metropolis, with an extensive trade and a solid civilization.

In truth, it is life itself, rather than an instinct, to make and create. Abilities, put in motion, must produce or destroy. Man is the engine, intuitions and rules the track, life the steam; he must work away and play away, on or off the track. The proverbial American propensity to whittle is but an excess of irrepressible vitality, in conjunction with the temptations of a shingle architecture and the various necessities of a new country; it is not an accidental peculiarity. We do not hesitate, in loose language, to call any artificial thing very natural, in its circumstances; all that is human appears quite inevitable, to some moods of mind. The Mormon temple, absurd as it seemed, was but an aerolite thrown westward by the fiery, superabundant energy of the nation. The Egyptian pyramids are the great crystals, formed in the high-tide life of that land. The old Gothic structures of Europe are the stalagmites and stalactites which grew in the cavernous gloom of the Dark Ages. The London Crystal Palace was its own Koh-i-noor diamond among edifices; or, possibly, such mountains of glass are the chemical product of the melting together of sand-like multitudes of men, mixed with the fixed alkali of love, not with the acid of hate. The large American hotels, everywhere rising, are the splendid icebergs suddenly brought upon us by the currents of travel and migration, and sweeping down from the cold arctic of wealth to summer seas of common sympathy and use. Washington Monuments are the necessary craters for the volcano of national glory. Broadway, or Washington Street, or Chestnut Street, is a deep strait for a roaring gulfstream of Cisatlantic life; vehicles are the drifted shells of many hues, silks the beautiful sea-weed, and brick buildings the red, marble the white, ever-growing coral-rocks. Reaping

machines are patent whirlwinds. Bowie-knives are the long thorns put forth by the human crab-apple tree, before it is reclaimed to sweetness by cultivation. All is life and growth in the universe,- forces seeking form. Books, statues, pictures, are well called children of the brain; they are unavoidable offspring of it, and of responsible character. The individual instinct of artist or artisan, if it be the predominant trait, is inextinguishable,-even his speciality of excellence in his branch of art is so too. The farm-boy must be a Chantrey; the Quaker child, a West. The impulse may be carried into political, commercial, or professional life, or may be lifted into a higher sphere, so as to expend itself in spiritual reconstructions and moral mouldings of the earth. And, in such case, there is no loss of lower benefits to the world; for, by some inscrutable means, all needed books, pictures, and inventions find authors for themselves.

War, vice, sin,—these alone really deface and destroy, and these occur by some just permission of Providence. But the subjection of matter to any, however imperfect, order,—the impression of any intelligence upon it, in the place of confusion, this must be referred, more or less directly, to the one great Source of all order and intelligence. And the essential likeness in all departments of production, human and divine, confirms this truth. Knives and ivory tusks are both implements; linen and lion's hide are alike tissues; temple and cave are each an edifice; and so with flute-notes and bird's song, boat-oar and fish-fin, books and volumes of rock inscribed with ripple-marks and petrifactions. Sin is the only thing that sunders any effect from the First Cause. Where that is, we can only say, there God has not secured the good in its place; there he has exerted less power, been less present, for his presence is light and order. His most amazing act of creatorship is the gifting of man with his own sovereign power to originate purposes; but this freedom of moral choice is between motives of different kinds, higher and lower, right and wrong. Now, in the sphere of art, choice lies between motives and ends of the same kind, between greater and less beauty, or use, or economy, or fitness; here is strictly no liberty; the stronger of like motives must govern; and hence, in philo

sophical accuracy, man's work, beyond the line of moral acts, is the work of the Most High.

Art has to do with sin in these ways: first, in the figurative sense that a violation of any rule of taste or utility is a transgression of such rule; secondly, that needless ignorance or neglect of these rules is a sin of carelessness or idleness; thirdly, that to pervert art to evil ends is as wrong as to degrade nature; fourthly, that arts, in themselves divine and dutiful, may interfere with higher duties; fifthly, if any art be a man's evident vocation, he may sin against it by following some other occupation. It is pleasant to observe that critics now recognize a moral element in the artist's style of execution; they speak of him as "sincere, faithful, conscientious," in his drawing or singing. With the above five, or more, exceptions, the one disconnecting thing-a moral choicedoes not separate any effect from the great Author.

Even the defects and deformities of human productions, so far as they are not due to culpable neglect, are a part of the ordained progress of the race from knowledge to knowledge. The so-called chaos, and the dragon-period, were no less nature than the present cosmos. Half the glory of a wilderness is in its rubbish, malformation, and desolation. A twisted tree and a ragged cliff are beautiful. In this light, we can discern something of the onward, comprehensive plan in unsightly architecture, awkward utensils, false and poor painting. And since this is so, how much more do we fulfil the Eternal Will in perfecting and beautifying anything!

Whether imperfect or not, a permanent work, still further, accomplishes a Divine purpose by recording the history of one for the benefit of another. A writer wisely remarks:"The Genius of the Hour sets his ineffaceable seal on man's work.

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As far as the spiritual character of the period overpowers the artist, and finds expression in his work, so far it will . . . . . represent to future beholders the Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine. No man can quite exclude this element of necessity from his labor. . . . . . The artist's pen or chisel seems to have been held and guided by a gigantic hand, to inscribe a line in the history of the human race.”

These true thoughts may be transplanted from their soil of fatalism. We feel that much is inevitable in the work of our

race, and therefore should feel, in view of the sum total of good wrought out, that a conscious Goodness is omnipresent in all things, not a blind Force. The delightful harmony of the productions of a nation with its time, place, and constitutional peculiarities, even to the minutest details, is quite beyond any individual purpose; and these productions are a record so much more eloquent than written history, that, language being admitted to be of divine origin, there can be no doubt that the specific impulses to other human arts are equally so. A glance at the relics of ancient Egypt is more instructive than Herodotus. The elaborate puerilities, grotesque ornaments, and absurd perspective of the Chinese, were they otherwise than they are, would not be Chinese. Each fresh item of national feature, in art as in act, is received with fresh relish; it is "just what we would have expected." It can hardly be conceived that the metropolis of the United States should have been other than it is; the imposing public buildings of Grecian model, the "magnificent distances" and meagre filling up, the Smithsonian Institute, the statues and the monuments, affect us as matters of course, -the most natural creations possible, all things considered.

More evidently do human works appear in some sort divine, when it is recollected that many individual impulses conspire, often, to a grand result. If a malevolent genius be thought to gather up the little threads of selfish human purpose and weave them into great cables and networks of wrong, certainly a sleepless superintendence is still more manifest in mighty and good issues. The London Exhibition was not due to Prince Albert or to Paxton; ages of private ingenuity tended to that public consummation; it was the splendid Niagara of myriad confluent streams of art and wealth, flowing through all time. All the world, including burglars, invented Hobbes's lock; all the world perfected the winning yacht and the prize reaping-machine. Michael Angelo but directed the hose-pipe of a huge reservoir of treasure, power, national genius and culture, when he played into the air that vast, petrified fountain, -curving down in domes, streaming down in columns, rainbowed with mosaic, St. Peter's. Such an enterprise as the Western Central or the Pacific Railroad has its roots in a