o many
conversations. I had the same experience already in a church at Naples.
There I saw that nothing was changed with me but the place, and said
to myself--'Thou foolish child, hast thou come out hither, over four
thousand miles of salt water, to find that which was perfect to thee
there at home?' That fact I saw again in the Academmia at Naples, in
the chambers of sculpture, and yet again when I came to Rome and to the
paintings of Raphael, Angelo, Sacchi, Titian, and Leonardo da Vinci.
"What, old mole! workest thou in the earth so fast?" It had travelled
by my side; that which I fancied I had left in Boston was here in
the Vatican, and again at Milan and at Paris, and made all travelling
ridiculous as a treadmill. I now require this of all pictures, that
they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too
picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain
dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.

The Transfiguration, by Raphael, is an eminent example of this peculiar
merit. A calm benignant beauty shines over all this picture, and goes
directly to the heart. It seems almost to call you by name. The sweet
and sublime face of Jesus is beyond praise, yet how it disappoints all
florid expectations! This familiar, simple, home-speaking countenance is
as if one should meet a friend. The knowledge of picture-dealers has its
value, but listen not to their criticism when your heart is touched by
genius. It was not painted for them, it was painted for you; for such as
had eyes capable of being touched by simplicity and lofty emotions.

Yet when we have said all our fine things about the arts, we must
end with a frank confession, that the arts, as we know them, are but
initial. Our best praise is given to what they aimed and promised, not
to the actual result. He has conceived meanly of the resources of man,
who believes that the best age of production is past. The real value
of the Iliad or the Transfiguration is as signs of power; billows or
ripples they are of the stream of tendency; tokens of the everlasting
effort to produce, which even in its worst estate the soul betrays. Art
has not yet come to its maturity if it do not put itself abreast with
the most potent influences of the world, if it is not practical and
moral, if it do not stand in connection with the conscience, if it do
not make the poor and uncultivated feel that it addresses them with a