t never was on sea or land; unknown Shapes that
meet outside space and time and question each other's identity; the dead
that come forth from their graves and glide, silent and spectral,
through a crowd, unseen by any one; the prayer of the celestial powers
poured forth in the utter solitude of the vast desert,--it is these that
are the realm of Vedder's art, and what has the normal world of portrait
and landscape to do with such art as this? Can it only be relegated to a
class, an order, of its own, and considered as being--Vedderesque? It
seems to stand alone and unparalleled. In his work lies the
transfiguration of all mystery. Vedder never paints nature, in the
sense of landscapes, and yet one often feels that he has the key to the
very creation of nature; that he has supped with gods and surprised the
secrets of the stars. Do the winds whisper to him?--

"The Muse can knit
What is past, what is done,
With the web that's just begun."

How can he find the design to phrase his thought--this painter of ideas?

"Can blaze be done in cochineal,
Or noon in mazarin?"

Whatever the Roman environment may have done for Allston, Page, and
Story, there is no question but that to Vedder it has been as his soul's
native air. For him the sirens sing again on the coast; the sorceress
works her spell; the Cumaean Sibyl again flies, wraithlike, over the
plain, clasping her rejected leaves of destiny which Tarquin in his
blindness has refused to buy. The Rome that lies buried under the ages
rises for Vedder. His art cannot be catalogued under any known division
of portrait, landscape, marine, or genre, but it is simply--the art of
Vedder. It stands alone and absolutely unrivalled. The pictorial
creations of Vedder are as wholly without precedent or comparison as if
they were the sole pictorial treasures of the world. The visitor may
care for them, or not care, according to his own ability to comprehend
and to recognize the inscrutable genius there manifested; but in either
case he will find nowhere else, in either ancient or contemporary art,
any parallel to these works.

One could well fancy that to any interrogation of his conceptions the
artist might reply:--

"I am seeker of the stone,
Living gem of Solomon.
But what is land, or what is wave,
To me, who only jewels crave?

* * * * *

I'm all-knowing, yet unknowing;
Stand not, pause not in m