thought which is to him good;
and this because the same power which sees through his eyes is seen in
that spectacle; and he will come to value the expression of nature and
not nature itself, and so exalt in his copy the features that please
him. He will give the gloom of gloom and the sunshine of sunshine. In a
portrait he must inscribe the character and not the features, and must
esteem the man who sits to him as himself only an imperfect picture or
likeness of the aspiring original within.

What is that abridgment and selection we observe in all spiritual
activity, but itself the creative impulse? for it is the inlet of that
higher illumination which teaches to convey a larger sense by simpler
symbols. What is a man but nature's finer success in self-explication?
What is a man but a finer and compacter landscape than the horizon
figures,--nature's eclecticism? and what is his speech, his love of
painting, love of nature, but a still finer success,--all the weary
miles and tons of space and bulk left out, and the spirit or moral of
it contracted into a musical word, or the most cunning stroke of the
pencil?

But the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation
to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men. Thus the new in art
is always formed out of the old. The Genius of the Hour sets his
ineffaceable seal on the work and gives it an inexpressible charm
for the imagination. As far as the spiritual character of the period
overpowers the artist and finds expression in his work, so far it will
retain a certain grandeur, and will represent to future beholders the
Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine. No man can quite exclude this
element of Necessity from his labor. No man can quite emancipate himself
from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education,
the religion, the politics, usages and arts of his times shall have no
share. Though he were never so original, never so wilful and fantastic,
he cannot wipe out of his work every trace of the thoughts amidst which
it grew. The very avoidance betrays the usage he avoids. Above his will
and out of his sight he is necessitated by the air he breathes and the
idea on which he and his contemporaries live and toil, to share the
manner of his times, without knowing what that manner is. Now that which
is inevitable in the work has a higher charm than individual talent can
ever give, inasmuch as the artist's pen or chisel seems to have been
held and