. The river, too,
is picturesque, for the old bridge has not been repaired since it was
blown up in the Seven Years' War; and there is but a single lazy barge
floating down the stream, owing to the tolls and tariffs of his Serene
Highness; the village is picturesque, for the flower of the young men are
at the wars, and the place is tumbling down; and the two old peasants in
the foreground, with the single goat and the hamper of vine-twigs, are
very picturesque likewise, for they are all in rags.

How sad to see the picturesque element eliminated, and the quiet artistic
beauty of the scene destroyed;--to have steamers puffing up and down the
river, and a railroad hurrying along its banks the wealth of the Old
World, in exchange for the wealth of the New--or hurrying, it may be,
whole regiments of free and educated citizen-soldiers, who fight, they
know for what. How sad to see the alto schloss desecrated by tourists,
and the neue schloss converted into a cold-water cure. How sad to see
the village, church and all, built up again brand-new, and whitewashed to
the very steeple-top;--a new school at the town-end--a new crucifix by
the wayside. How sad to see the old folk well clothed in the fabrics of
England or Belgium, doing an easy trade in milk and fruit, because the
land they till has become their own, and not the prince's; while their
sons are thriving farmers on the prairies of the far West. Very
unpicturesque, no doubt, is wealth and progress, peace and safety,
cleanliness and comfort. But they possess advantages unknown to the
Ancien Regime, which was, if nothing else, picturesque. Men could paint
amusing and often pretty pictures of its people and its places.

Consider that word, "picturesque." It, and the notion of art which it
expresses, are the children of the Ancien Regime--of the era of decay.
The healthy, vigorous, earnest, progressive Middle Age never dreamed of
admiring, much less of painting, for their own sake, rags and ruins; the
fashion sprang up at the end of the seventeenth century; it lingered on
during the first quarter of our century, kept alive by the reaction from
1815-25. It is all but dead now, before the return of vigorous and
progressive thought. An admirer of the Middle Ages now does not build a
sham ruin in his grounds; he restores a church, blazing with colour, like
a medieval illumination. He has learnt to look on that which went by the
name of picturesque in his great-grandfa