hundred and fifty of his
pictures are now on exhibition. In contrast with the dark prison scene, how
beautiful the canvas! Mr. Kensett had an irresistible way of calling trees
and rocks and waters into his pictures. He only beckoned and they came.
Once come, he pinioned them for ever. Why, that man could paint a breeze on
the water, so it almost wet your face with the spray. So restful are his
pictures you feel after seeing them as though for half a day you had been
sprawled under a tree in July weather, summered through and through.

Thirty of such pictures he painted each year in one hundred and twenty
days, and then died--quickly and unwarned, dropping his magician's wand, to
be picked up never. I wondered if he was ready, and if the God whom he had
often met amid the moss on the sea-cliffs and in the offing was the God who
pardoned sin and by His grace saves painter and boor. The Lord bless the
unappreciated artists; they do a glorious work for God and the world, but
for the most part live in penury, and the brightest color on their palette
is crimson with their own blood.

May the time hasten when the Frenchmen who put on canvas their Cupids
poorly clad, and the Germans who hang up homely Dutch babies in the arms of
the Virgin Mary and call them Madonnas, shall be overruled by the artists
who, like Kensett, make their canvas a psalm of praise to the Lord of the
winds and the waters!

I stepped across the way into the Young Men's Christian Association of New
York, with its reading-rooms and library and gymnasium and bath-rooms, all
means of grace--a place that proposes to charm young men from places of sin
by making religion attractive. It is a palace for the Lord--the pride of
New York, or ought to be; I do not believe it really is, but it ought to
be. It is fifty churches with its arms of Christian usefulness stretched
out toward the young men.

If a young man come in mentally worn out, it gives him dumb-bells, parallel
bars and a bowling-alley with no rum at either end of it. If physically
worsted, it rests him amid pictures and books and newspapers. If a young
man come in wanting something for the soul, there are the Bible-classes,
prayer-meetings and preaching of the gospel.

Religion wears no monk's cowl in that place, no hair shirt, no spiked
sandals, but the floor and the ceiling and the lounges and the tables and
the cheerful attendants seem to say: "Her ways are ways of pleasantness,
and all her paths