sembly, I
understand well what he meant who said, "When I have been reading Homer,
all men look like giants." I too see that painting and sculpture are
gymnastics of the eye, its training to the niceties and curiosities of
its function. There is no statue like this living man, with his infinite
advantage over all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety. What a gallery
of art have I here! No mannerist made these varied groups and diverse
original single figures. Here is the artist himself improvising, grim
and glad, at his block. Now one thought strikes him, now another, and
with each moment he alters the whole air, attitude and expression of his
clay. Away with your nonsense of oil and easels, of marble and chisels;
except to open your eyes to the masteries of eternal art, they are
hypocritical rubbish.

The reference of all production at last to an aboriginal Power explains
the traits common to all works of the highest art,--that they are
universally intelligible; that they restore to us the simplest states
of mind, and are religious. Since what skill is therein shown is the
reappearance of the original soul, a jet of pure light, it should
produce a similar impression to that made by natural objects. In happy
hours, nature appears to us one with art; art perfected,--the work of
genius. And the individual, in whom simple tastes and susceptibility to
all the great human influences overpower the accidents of a local and
special culture, is the best critic of art. Though we travel the world
over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.
The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines,
or rules of art can ever teach, namely a radiation from the work of art
of human character,--a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or
musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature,
and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these
attributes. In the sculptures of the Greeks, in the masonry of the
Romans, and in the pictures of the Tuscan and Venetian masters, the
highest charm is the universal language they speak. A confession of
moral nature, of purity, love, and hope, breathes from them all. That
which we carry to them, the same we bring back more fairly illustrated
in the memory. The traveller who visits the Vatican, and passes from
chamber to chamber through galleries of statues, vases, sarcophagi and
candelabra, through all forms of bea