LEFT. "I left at ten o'clock." This use of leave as a neuter verb, however attractive from its brevity, is not defensible. To leave off is the only proper neuter form. "We left off at six, and left (the hall) at a quarter past six." The place should be inserted after the second left. Even the first is essentially active, some form of action being understood after off: we left off work or play.

MIDST. "In our midst" is a common but incorrect phrase.

OUR AUTHOR. A vulgarism, which, by its seeming convenience, gets the countenance of critical writers. We say seeming convenience; for in this seeming lies the vulgarity, the writer expressing, unconsciously often, by the our, a feeling of patronage. With his our he pats the author on the back.

PERIODICAL is an adjective, and its use as a substantive is an unwarrantable gain of brevity at the expense of grammar.

PROPOSE. Hardly any word that we have cited is so frequently misused, and by so many good writers, as propose, when the meaning is to design, to intend to propose. It should always be followed by a personal accusative—I propose to you, to him, to myself. In the preface to Hawthorne's "Marble Faun" occurs the following sentence; "The author proposed to himself merely to write a fanciful story, evolving a thoughtful moral, and did not purpose attempting a portraiture of Italian manners and character"—a sentence than which a fitter could not be written to illustrate the proper use of propose and purpose.

PREDICATED UPON. This abomination is paraded by persons who lose no chance of uttering "dictionary words," hit or miss; and is sometimes heard from others from whom the educated world has a right to look for more correctness.

RELIABLE. A counterfeit, which no stamping by good writers or universality of circulation will ever be able to introduce into the family circle of honest English as a substitute for the robust Saxon word whose place it would usurp—trustworthy. Reliable is, however, good English when used to signify that one is liable again. When you have lost a receipt, and cannot otherwise prove that a bill rendered has been paid, you are re-liable for the amount.

RELIGION. Even by scholars this word is often used with looseness. In strictness it expresses exclusively our relation to the Infinite, the bond between man and God. You will sometimes read that he is the truly religious man who most faithfully performs his duties of neighbor, father, son, husband, citizen. However much a religious man may find himself strengthened by his faith and inspirited for the performance of all his duties, this strength is an indirect, and not a uniform or necessary, effect of religious convictions. Some men who are sincere in such convictions fail in these duties conspicuously; while, on the other hand, they are performed, at times, with more than common fidelity by men who do not carry within them any very lively religious belief or impressions. "And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." Nor can the greatest do the work of the others any more than faith that of hope or charity. Each one of "these three" is different from and independent of the other, however each one be aided by cooperation from the others. The deep, unique feeling which lifts up and binds the creature to the Creator is elementarily one in the human mind, and the word used to denote it should be kept solely for this high office, and not weakened or perverted by other uses. Worcester quotes from Dr. Watts the following sound definition: "In a proper sense, virtue signifies duty toward men, and religion duty to God."

SALOON. That eminent pioneer of American sculpture, brilliant talker, and accomplished gentleman, the lamented Horatio Greenough, was indignantly eloquent against the American abuse of this graceful importation from France, applied as it is in the United States to public billiard-rooms, oyster-cellars and grog-shops.

SUBJECT-MATTER. A tautological humpback.

TO VENTILATE, applied to a subject or person. The scholar who should use this vilest of vulgarisms deserves to have his right thumb taken off.

We have here noted a score of the errors prevalent in written and spoken speech—some of them perversions or corruptions, countenanced even by eminent writers; some, misapplications that weaken and disfigure the style of him who adopts them; and some, downright vulgarisms—that is, phrases that come from below, and are thrust into clean company with the odors of slang about them. These last are often a device for giving piquancy to style. Against such abuses we should be the more heedful, because, from the convenience of some of them, they get so incorporated into daily speech as not to be readily distinguishable from their healthy neighbors, clinging for generations to tongues and pens. Of this tenacity there is a notable exemplification in a passage of Boswell, written nearly a hundred years ago. Dr. Johnson found fault with Boswell for using the phrase to make money: "Don't you see the impropriety of it? To make money is to coin it: you should say get money." Johnson, adds Boswell, "was jealous of infractions upon the genuine English language, and prompt to repress colloquial barbarisms; such as pledging myself, for undertaking; line for department or branch, as the civil line, the banking line. He was particularly indignant against the almost universal use of the word idea in the sense of notion or opinion, when it is clear that idea can only signify something of which an image can be formed in the mind. We may have an idea or image of a mountain, a tree, a building, but we surely cannot have an idea or image of an argument or proposition. Yet we hear the sages of the law 'delivering their ideas upon the question under consideration;' and the first speakers of Parliament 'entirely coinciding in the idea which has been ably stated by an honorable member.'"

Whether or not the word idea may be properly used in a deeper or grander sense than that stated by Dr. Johnson, there is no doubt that he justly condemned its use in the cases cited by him, and in similar ones. All the four phrases make money, pledge, line, and idea, whereupon sentence of guilty was passed by the great lexicographer, are still at large, and, if it be not a bull to say so, more at large to-day than in the last century, since the area of their currency has been extended to America, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.



VIII.

A NATIONAL DRAMA.[8]

[8] From Putnam's Monthly, 1857.

We are eminently a people of action; we are fond of shows, processions, and organized spectacles; we are so much more imitative than our British cousins, that, without limiting its appeals to the mimetic files of fashion, the ungentlemanly theory of a Simian descent for man might find support in the features of our general life. To complete the large compound of qualities that are required, in order that an emulous people give birth to a drama, one is yet wanting; but that one is not merely the most important of all, but is the one which lifts the others into dramatic importance. Are we poetical? Ask any number of continental Europeans, whether the English are a poetical people. A loud, unanimous, derisive no would be the answer. And yet, there is Shakespeare! and around him, back to Chaucer and forward to Tennyson, a band of such poets, that this prosaic nation has the richest poetic literature in Christendom. Especially in this matter are appearances delusive, and hasty inferences liable to be illogical. From the prosers that one hears in pulpits, legislatures, lecture-rooms, at morning calls and well-appointed dinner-tables in Anglo-America, let no man infer against our poetic endowment. Shakespeare, and Milton, and Burns, and Wordsworth, are of our stock; and what we have already done in poetry and the plastic arts, while yet, as a nation, hardly out of swaddling-clothes, is an earnest of a creative future. We are to have a national literature and a national drama. What is a national drama? Premising that as little in their depth as in their length will our remarks be commensurate with the dimensions of this great theme, we would say a few words.

A literature is the expression of what is warmest and deepest in the heart of a people. Good books are the crystallization of thoughts and feelings. To have a literature—that is, a body of enduring books—implies vigor and depth. Such books are the measure of the mental vitality in a people. Those peoples that have the best books will be found to be at the top of the scale of humanity; those that have none, at the bottom. Good books, once brought forth, exhale ever after both fragrance and nourishment. They educate while they delight many generations.

Good books are the best thoughts of the best men. They issue out of deep hearts and strong heads; and where there are deep hearts and strong heads such books are sure to come to life. The mind, like the body, will reproduce itself: the mind, too, is procreative, transmitting itself to a remote posterity.

The best books are the highest products of human effort. Themselves the evidence of creative power, they kindle and nourish power. Consider what a spring of life to European people have been the books of the Hebrews. What so precious treasure has England as Shakespeare?

To be good, books must be generic. They may be, in subject, in tone, and in color, national; but in substance they must be so universally human, that other cognate nations can imbibe and be nourished by them. Not that, in their fashioning, this fitness for foreign minds is to be a conscious aim; but to be thus attractive and assimilative, is a proof of their breadth and depth—of their high humanity.

The peoples who earliest reached the state of culture which is needed to bring forth books, each standing by itself, each necessarily sang and wrote merely of itself. Thus did the Hebrews and the Greeks. But already the Romans went out of themselves, and Virgil takes a Trojan for his hero. This appropriation of foreign material shows that the aim of high books is, to ascend to the sphere of ideas and feelings that are independent of time and place. Thence, when, by multiplication of Christian nations our mental world had become vastly enlarged, embracing in one bond of culture, not only all modern civilized peoples, but also the three great ancient ones, the poets—especially the dramatic, for reasons that will be presently stated—looked abroad and afar for the frame-work and corporeal stuff of their writings.

The most universal of all writers, ancient or modern, he who is most generic in his thought, Shakespeare, embodied his transcendent conceptions for the most part in foreign personages. Of Shakespeare's fourteen comedies, the scene of only one is laid in England; and that one, "The Merry Wives of Windsor"—the only one not written chiefly or largely in verse—is a Shakespearean farce. Of the tragedies (except the series of the ten historical ones) only two, "Lear" and "Macbeth," stand on British ground. Is "Hamlet" on that score less English than "Lear," or "Othello" than "Macbeth"? Does Italy count Juliet among her trophies, or Desdemona?

Of Milton's two dramas—-to confine myself here to the dramatic domain—the tragedy ("Samson Agonistes,") like his epics, is Biblical; the comedy ("Comus") has its home in a sphere

"Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot Which men call earth."

Of the numerous athletic corps of dramatists, contemporary with Shakespeare and Milton, few have left works pithy enough and so poetically complete as to withstand the wear of time and keep fresh to each successive generation. But if you inspect the long list from which Charles Lamb took his "Specimens," you will find few British names.

Casting our eyes on the dramatic efforts of the recent English poetic celebrities, we perceive that Byron, Coleridge, and Shelley, all abandoned, in every instance, native ground. The only dramatic work of a great modern, the scene of which is laid within the British limits, is "The Borderers," of Wordsworth, which, though having the poetic advantage of remoteness in time—being thrown back to the reign of Henry III.—is, in strictness, neither a drama nor a poem, Wordsworth's deficiency in dramatic gifts being so signal as to cause, by the impotent struggle in an uncongenial element, a partial paralysis even of his high poetic genius.

Glance now across the Channel. French poetic tragedy is in its subjects almost exclusively ancient—Greek, Roman, and Biblical. In the works of the great comic genius of France, Moliere, we have a salient exception to the practice of all other eminent dramatists. The scene of his plays is Paris; the time is the year in which each was written.

Let us look for the cause of this remarkable isolation.

Moliere was the manager of a theatrical company in the reign of Louis XIV., and he wrote, as he himself declares, to please the king and amuse the Parisians. But deeper than this; Moliere was by nature a great satirist. I call him a great satirist, because of the affluence of inward substance that fed his satiric appetite—namely, a clear, moral sensibility, distinguishing by instinct the true from the false, rare intellectual nimbleness, homely common sense, shrewd insight into men, a keen wit, with vivid perception of the comic and absurd. For a satirist so variously endowed, the stage was the best field, and for Moliere especially, gifted as he was with histrionic genius. The vices and abuses, the follies and absurdities, the hypocrisies and superficialities of civilized life, these were the game for his faculties. The interior of Paris households he transferred to the stage with biting wit, doubling the attractiveness of his pictures by comic hyperbole. His portraits are caricatures, not because they exaggerate vices or foibles, but because they so bloat out a single personage with one vice or one folly as to make him a lop-sided deformity. Characters he did not seek to draw, but he made a personage the medium of incarnating a quality. Harpagon is not a miser; he is Avarice speaking and doing. Alceste is not a person; he is Misanthropy personified.

This fundamental exaggeration led to and facilitated the caricature of relations and juxtapositions. With laughable unscrupulousness Moliere multiplies improbable blunders and conjunctions. All verisimilitude is sacrificed to scenic vivacity. Hence, the very highest of his comedies are farce-like; even "Tartuffe" is so.

In Moliere little dramatic growth goes on before the spectator's eye. His personages are not gradually built up by successive touches, broad or fine; they do not evolve themselves chiefly by collision with others; in the first act they come on the stage unfolded. The action and plot advance rapidly, but not through the unrolling of the persons represented. Hence, his most important personages are prosaic and finite. They interest you more as agents for the purpose in hand than as men and women. They are subordinate rather to the action than creative of action.

Moliere is a most thorough realist, and herein is his strength. In him the comic is a vehicle for satire; and the satire gives pungency and body to the comic. He was primarily a satirist, secondarily a poet. Such being his powers and his aims, helpful to him, nay, needful, was a present Parisian actuality of story and agents. A poetic comedy ought to be, and will necessarily be, a chapter of very high life. Moliere's comedies, dealing unctuously with vice and folly, are, philosophically speaking, low life. His are comedies not of character and sentiment, but of manners and morals, and therefore cannot be highly poetical; and thence he felt no want of a remote ground, clean of all local coloring and association, such as is essential to the dramatist whose inspiration is poetical, and who therefore must reconcile the ideal with the real, by which reconciliation only can be produced the purest truth. That, notwithstanding they belong not to the highest poetic sphere, his comedies continue to live and to be enjoyed, this testifies of the breadth and truthfulness of his humanity, the piercing insight of his rich mind, and his superlative comic genius.

Of Alfieri's twenty-two tragedies, three only are modern, and of these three the scene of one is in Spain.

Of the nine or ten tragedies of the foremost German dramatic poet, Schiller, three are German, "The Robbers," "Intrigue and Love," and "Wallenstein."

Goethe's highest dramas, "Iphigenia," "Egmont," "Torquato Tasso," are all foreign in clothing. "The Natural Daughter" has no local habitation, no dependence on time or place. "Goetz von Berlichingen," written in Goethe's earliest days of authorship, is German and in prose, "Faust"—the greatest poem of these latter times, and rivaling the greatest poems of all time—"Faust" is not strictly a drama: its wonderful successive scenes are not bound together by dramatic necessity.

The drama of Spain, like the comedies of Moliere, is an exception to the rule we deduce from the practice of other dramatists; but it is an exception which, like that of Moliere, confirms the rule. Unlike the ancient Greek and the French tragic poets, unlike Schiller, Shakespeare, Goethe, Alfieri, the Spanish dramatists do not aim at ideal humanity. The best of them, Calderon, is so intensely Spanish and Romish, as to be, in comparison with the breadth and universality of his eminent compeers above named, almost provincial. His personages are not large and deep enough to be representative. The manifold recesses of great minds he does not unveil; he gets no deeper than the semi-barbarous exaggerations of selfish, passionate love; of revenge, honor, and jealousy. His characterization is weak. His highest characters lack intellectual calibre, and are exhibited in lyrical one-sidedness rather than dramatic many-sidedness. He is mostly content with Spanish cavaliers of the seventeenth century, ruled by the conventionalisms in manners, morals, and superstition, which have already passed away even in Spain. He is a marvelously fertile, skillful, poetic playwright.

Thus we perceive that, with poetic dramatists, the prevailing practice is, to look abroad for fables. Moreover, in the cases where these were drawn from the bosom of the poet's own people, he shuns the present, and hies as far back as he can into the dark abysms of time, as Shakespeare does in Macbeth and Lear. The Greek tragic poets, having no outward resource, took possession of the fabulous era of Greece. The poetic dramatist seeks mostly a double remoteness, that of place as well as that of time; and he must have one or the other.

The law lying behind this phenomenon is transparent. The higher poetry is, the more generic it is. Its universality is a chief constituent of its excellence. The drama is the most generically human, and, therefore, the highest of the great forms of poetry. The epic deals with the material, the outward—humanity concreted into events; the lyric with the inward, when that is so individual and intense as to gush out in ode or song. The dramatic is the union of the epic and lyric—the inward moulding the outward, predominant over the outward while co-working with it. In the dramatic, the action is more made by the personality; in the epic, the personality is more merged in the strong, full stream of events. The lyric is the utterance of one-sided, partial (however deep and earnest) feeling, the which must be linked to other feelings to give wholeness to the man and his actions. The dramatic combines several lyrics with the epic. Out of humanity and human action it extracts the essence. It presents men in their completest form, in warm activity, impelled thereto by strongest feelings. Hence, it must be condensed and compact, and must, for its highest display, get rid of local coloring, personal associations, and all prosaic circumscriptions. The poetic dramatist needs the highest poetic freedom, and only through this can he attain to that breadth and largeness whereof the superiority of his form admits, and which are such in Shakespeare, that in his greatest plays the whole world seems to be present as spectators and listeners.

Observe that the highest dramatic literatures belong to the two freest peoples—the Greeks and the English. A people, possessing already a large political freedom, must be capable of, and must be in the act of, vigorous, rich development, through deep inward passion and faculty, in order that its spirit shall issue in the perennial flowers of the poetic drama. The dramatic especially implies and demands variety and fullness and elevation of personality; and this is only possible through freedom, the attainment of which freedom implies on its side the innate fertility of nature which results in fullness and elevation.

Now in the subjective elevation of the individual, and therewith the unprecedented relative number of individuals thus elevated, herein do we exceed all other peoples. By subjective elevation I mean, liberation from the outward, downward pressure of dogmatic prescription, of imperious custom, of blindfolded tradition, of irresponsible authority. The despotic objectivity of Asia—where religion is submissiveness, and manhood is crushed by obedience—has been partially withstood in Europe. The emancipation therefrom of the Indo-Germanic race is completed in Anglo-America. Through this manifold emancipation we are to be, in all the high departments of human achievement, preeminently creative, because, while equipped with the best of the past, we are at the same time preeminently subjective; and, therefore, high literature will, with us, necessarily take the lyrical, and especially the dramatic, form.

More than our European ancestors, we mold, each one of us, our own destiny; we have a stronger inward sense of power to unfold and elevate ourselves; we are more ready and more capable to withstand the assaults of circumstance. Here is more thoroughly embodied the true Christian principle, that out of himself is to come every man's redemption; that the favor and help of God are only to be obtained through resolute self-help, and honest, earnest struggle. In Christendom we stand alone as having above us neither the objectivity of politics nor that of the church. The light of the past we have, without its darkness. We carry little weight from the exacting past. Hence, our unexampled freedom and ease of movement which, wanting the old conventional ballast, to Europeans seems lawless and reckless. Even among ourselves, many tremble for our future, because they have little faith in humanity, and because they cannot grasp the new, grand historic phenomenon of a people possessing all the principles, practices, and trophies of civilization without its paralyzing incumbrances.

But think not, because we are less passive to destiny, we are rebellious against Deity; because we are boldly self-reliant, we are, therefore, irreligiously defiant. The freer a people is, the nearer it is to God. The more subjective it is, through acquired self-rule, the more will it harmonize with the high objectivity of absolute truth and justice. For having thrown off the capricious secondary rule of man, we shall not be the less, but the more, under the steadfast, primary rule of God; for having broken the force of human, fallible prescription, we shall the more feel and acknowledge the supremacy of flawless, divine law; for having rejected the tyranny of man's willfulness, we shall submit the more fully to the beneficent power of principle.

Our birth, growth, and continued weal, depending on large, deep principles—principles deliberately elaborated and adopted by reason, and generously embracing the whole—our life must be interpenetrated by principle, and thence our literature must embrace the widest and most human wants and aspirations of man. And thus, it will be our privilege and our glory to be then the most national in our books when we are the most universal.



IX.

USEFULNESS OF ART.

ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE INAUGURATION OF THE RHODE ISLAND ART ASSOCIATION IN PROVIDENCE, SEPTEMBER 4, 1854.

Gentlemen of the Rhode Island Art Association:—

We are met to inaugurate an Association whose aim and end shall be the encouragement and culture of Art. A most high end—among the highest that men can attempt; an end that never can be entertained except by men of the best breed. There is no art among savages, none among barbarians. Barbarism and art are adversary terms. When men capable of civilization ascend into it, art manifests itself an inevitable accompaniment, an indispensable aid to human development. I will say further, that in a people the capacity to be cultivated involves the capacity, nay, the necessity of art. And still further, that those nations that have been or are preeminent on the earth, are preeminent in art. Nay, more, that a nation cannot attain to and maintain eminence without being proficient in art; and that to abstract from a people its artists were not merely to pluck the flowers from its branches; it were to cut off its-deep roots.

Who is the artist?

He who embodies, in whatever mode,—so that they be visible or audible, and thus find entrance to the mind,—conceptions of the beautiful, is an artist. The test and characteristic of the artistic nature are superior sensibility to the beautiful. Unite to this the faculties and the will to give form to the impressions and emotions that are the fruit of this susceptibility, and you have the artist. Whether he shall embody his conception in written verse, in marble, in stone, in sound, on the canvas, that will depend on each one's individual aptitudes. Generic, common, indispensable to all is the superior sensibility to the beautiful. In this lies the essence of the artist.

The beautiful and the perfect being, if not identical, in closest consanguinity, the artist's is an important, a great function. The artist must receive into his mind, or engender in his mind's native richness, conceptions of what is most high, most perfect, most beautiful in shape or sound, in thought or feeling; and producing it before his fellow-men, appeal to their sensibility to the beautiful, to their deepest sympathies, to their capacity of being moved by the grandest and the noblest there is in man and nature. Truly, a mighty part is that of the artist.

Artists are the educators of humanity. Tutors and professors instruct princes and kings, but poets (and all genuine artists are poets) educate nations. Take from Greece Homer and Phidias, and Sophocles and Scopas, and the planner of the Parthenon, and you efface Greece from history. Wanting them, she would not have been the great Greece that we know; she would not have had the vigor of sap, the nervous vitality, to have continued to live in a remote posterity, immortal in the culture, the memories, and the gratitude of men.

So great, so far-stretching, so undying is the power of this exalted class of men, that it were hardly too much to say that had Homer and Phidias never lived, we should not be here today. If this be deemed extravagant, with confidence I affirm that but for the existence of the greatest artist the world has ever known,—of him who may be called the chief educator of England,—but for Shakespeare, we assuredly should not be here to-day doing the good work we are doing.

There are probably some of this company who, like myself, having had the good fortune to be in London at the time of the world's fair, stood under that magnificent, transparent roof, trod that immense area whereon fifty thousand people moved at ease. It was a privilege,—the memory of which will last a life-time, to have been admitted into that gigantic temple of industry, there to behold in unimaginable profusion and variety the product of man's labor, intellect, and genius, gathered from the four corners of the earth into one vast, gorgeous pile,—a spectacle peerless from its mere material splendor, and from its moral significance absolutely sublime.

On entering by the chief portal into the transept,—covering in the huge oaks of Hyde Park,—the American, after wondering for a moment in the glare of the first aspect, will, with the eagerness and perhaps the vanity of his nation,—have hastened through the compartments of France, Belgium, Germany, gorgeous with color, glistening with gold. He will have hastened, hard as it was to hurry through such a show, in order to reach at once the far eastern end of the palace where a broad area had been allotted to the United States,—Jonathan, as is his wont, having helped himself largely. Great was the American's disappointment, cutting was the rebuke to his vanity; his country made no show at all. The samples of her industry were not outwardly brilliant. Their excellence lay in their inward power, in their wide usefulness. They were not ornaments and luxuries for the dwellings of the few, they were inventions that diffuse comforts and blessings among the many,—labor-saving machines and cheap newspapers. By the thoughtful visitor the merit of these was appreciated, as it was acknowledged in the final awards of the judges. And even in this high department where we are so eminent, owing to distance and misunderstandings, we were not adequately represented. But even if we had been, the European would have said, "This has a high value and interest; but still I find not here enough to justify the expectations entertained by this people, and by many in Europe, of the future greatness of the American Republic. These things, significant as they are, are yet not an alphabet that can be so compounded as to write the richest page of man's history. In this present display I find not prefigured that splendid future the Americans are fond of predicting for themselves." And the American, acknowledging the force of the comment, would have turned away mortified, humbled. But he was saved any such humiliation. In the midst of that area, under that beautiful flag, day after day, week after week, month after month, from morn till night, go when he would, he beheld there a circle ever full, its vacancies supplied as soon as they were made, a circle silent with admiration, hushed by emotion, gazing at a master-piece of American art, the Greek Slave of Powers. And from that contemplation hundreds of thousands of Europeans carried away an impression of American capacity, a conviction that truly a great page is to be written by the young republic in the book of history,—a sense of American power which they could have gotten from no other source.

Our Association, gentlemen, owes its origin to the wants of industry. The moving power which has been strongest in bringing so many of us together to found an institution for the encouragement of art in Rhode Island, is the desire hereby more thoroughly to inweave the beautiful into cotton and woolen fabrics, into calicoes and delaines; to melt the beautiful into iron and brass, and copper, as well as into silver and gold; so that our manufacturers and artisans may hold their own against the competition of England and France and Germany, whereof in the two latter countries especially, schools of design have long existed, and high artists find their account in furnishing the beautiful to manufacturers.

"A low origin this for such a society, and the fruits will be without flavor. Art will not submit to be so lowered," will say some travelled dilettante, who, with book in hand, has looked by rote on the wonders of the Louvre and the Vatican; but the Creator of the universe teaches a different lesson from this observer. Not the rare lightning merely, but the daily sunlight, too; not merely the distant star-studded canopy of the earth, but also our near earth itself, has He made beautiful. He surrounds us with beauty; He envelops us in beauty. Beauty is spread out on the familiar grass, glows in the daily flower, glistens in the dew, waves in the commonest leafy branch. All about us, in infinite variety, beauty is lavished by God in sights and sounds, and odors. Now, in using the countless and multifarious substances that are put within our reach, to be by our ingenuity and contrivance wrought into materials for our protection and comfort, and pleasure, it becomes us to—it is part of his design that we shall—follow the divine example, so that in all our handiwork, as in his, there shall be beauty, so much as the nature of each product is susceptible of. That it is the final purpose of Providence that our whole life, inward and outward, shall be beautiful, and be steeped in beauty, we have evidence, in the yearnings of the best natures for the perfect, in the delight we take in the most resplendent objects of art and nature, in the ennobling thrill we feel on witnessing a beautiful deed.

By culture we can so create and multiply beauty, that all our surroundings shall be beautiful.

Can you not imagine a city of the size of this, or vastly larger, the structure of whose streets and buildings shall be made under the control of the best architectural ideas, being of various stones and marbles, and various in style and color, so that each and every one shall be either light, or graceful, or simple, or ornate, or solid, or grand, according to its purpose, and the conception of the builder; and in the midst and on the borders of the city, squares, and parks, planted with trees and flowers and freshened by streams and fountains. And when you recall the agreeable, the elevating sensation you have experienced in front of a perfect piece of architecture (still so rare), will you not readily concede that where every edifice should be beautiful, and you never walked or drove out but through streets of palaces and artistic parks, the effect on the whole population of this ever-present beauty and grandeur, would be to refine, to expand, to elevate. When we look at the architectural improvements made within a generation, in London, in Paris, in New York, we may, without being Utopians, hope for this transformation. But the full consummation of such a hope can only be brought about in unison with improvements in all the conditions and relations of life, and the diffusion of such improvements among the masses.

It is to further-such diffusion that this Association has been founded. Our purpose is to meet the growing demand for beauty in all things; to bring into closer cooperation the artisan and the artist; to make universally visible and active the harmony,—I almost might say the identity,—there is between the useful and the beautiful.

Gentlemen, ever in the heart of the practical, in the very core of the useful, there is enclosed a seed of beauty; and upon the fructification, growth, and expansion of that seed depends,—aye, absolutely depends,—the development of the practical. But for the expansion of that seed, we should have neither the plough nor the printing-press, neither shoes nor the steam engine. To that we owe silver forks as well as the electric telegraph. In no province of work or human endeavor is improvement made, is improvement possible, but by the action of that noble faculty through which we are uplifted when standing before a masterpiece of Raphael. This ceaseless seeking for a better, this unresting impulse towards the perfect, has brought the English race through a thousand years of gradual upward movement, from the narrow heptarchy, with its rude simplicity of life, up to this wide cultivated confederacy of states with its multiform opulence of life; and will yet carry us to a condition as much superior to our present as that is to the times of Alfred.

In the works of the Almighty this principle is so alive that they are radiant with beauty; and the degree of the radiance of each is often the measure of its usefulness. How beautiful is a field of golden wheat—whereby our bodies live—and the more beautiful the closer it stands and the fuller are its heads. The oak and the pine owe their majestic beauty to that which is the index of their usefulness, the solid magnitude of their trunks. The proportions which give the horse his highest symmetry of form, give him his fleetness and endurance and strength. And thus, too, with man,—his works, when best, sparkle most with this fire of the beautiful. We profit by history in proportion as it registers beautiful sayings and beautiful doings. We profit one another in everyday life in proportion as our acts, the minor as well as the greater, are vitalized by this divine essence of beauty. To the speeches of Webster, even to the most technical, this essence gives their completeness and their grandeur of proportion; while it is this which illuminates with undying splendor the creations of Allston. Thus, gentlemen, the aim of our Association is most noble and useful, drawing its nobleness from its high usefulness. May it so prosper, that a generation hence, thousands and tens of thousands shall look back to this the day of its inauguration with praise and thankfulness.

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