of its threshold the ground is foul and cattle-trampled; its timbers are
black with smoke, its garden choked with weeds and nameless refuse, its
chambers empty and joyless, the light and wind gleaming and filtering
through the crannies of their stones. All testifies that to its
inhabitant the world is labor and vanity; that for him neither flowers
bloom, nor birds sing, nor fountains glisten; and that his soul hardly
differs from the grey cloud that coils and dies upon his hills; except
in having no fold of it touched by the sunbeams.

Sec. 6. Is it not strange to reflect, that hardly an evening passes in
London or Paris but one of those cottages is painted for the better
amusement of the fair and idle, and shaded with pasteboard pines by the
scene-shifter; and that good and kind people,--poetically
minded,--delight themselves in imagining the happy life led by peasants
who dwell by Alpine fountains, and kneel to crosses upon peaks of rock?
that nightly we lay down our gold to fashion forth simulacra of
peasants, in gay ribands and white bodices, singing sweet songs, and
bowing gracefully to the picturesque crosses; and all the while the
veritable peasants are kneeling, songlessly, to veritable crosses, in
another temper than the kind and fair audiences dream of, and assuredly
with another kind of answer than is got out of the opera catastrophe; an
answer having reference, it may be, in dim futurity, to those very
audiences themselves? If all the gold that has gone to paint the
simulacra of the cottages, and to put new songs in the mouths of the
simulacra of the peasants, had gone to brighten the existent cottages,
and to put new songs into the mouths of the existent peasants, it might
in the end, perhaps, have turned out better so, not only for the
peasants, but for even the audience. For that form of the False Ideal
has also its correspondent True Ideal,--consisting not in the naked
beauty of statues, nor in the gauze flowers and crackling tinsel of
theatres, but in the clothed and fed beauty of living men, and in the
lights and laughs of happy homes. Night after night, the desire of such
an ideal springs up in every idle human heart; and night after night, as
far as idleness can, we work out this desire in costly lies. We paint
the faded actress, build the lath landscape, feed our benevolence with
fallacies of felicity, and satisfy our righteousness with poetry of
justice. The time will come when, as the heavy-folded