s, to preserve the balance between the animal and the
spiritual part of their lives, and to clothe their surroundings with a
higher and holier significance than can arise from the events and
associations of the work-day life. In art the missing link is found, and
whether it be the simple ballad in the evening circle or the modest
print that graces the humble cottage walls--and the humbler the
habitation the deeper the manifestation, because the more touching--it
is but the expression of the people's appreciation of the needs, the
capacities, and the holier aspirations of the better part of humanity.
Hence the revival of art has a deep significance; it is something more
than a forced, an exotic, and hence ephemeral growth; it is the
manifestation of the awakening of the people to the aesthetic sentiment;
it is the actual result of the intellectual and moral needs of society;
it is in itself the striving of a great people for the beautiful and
true. And as such it has a broad and deep foundation in the godlike in
human nature, which shall insure not only its permanence but its
progress as long as the good and the true have any influence whatever
upon our society. That we have had, until a comparatively late period,
no art among us, is the result not of a lack of capacity to comprehend
the beautiful, but of the intense and all-absorbing passion for gain
which has so nearly proved the bane of our society by shutting out the
consideration of better things: that art has so suddenly revived in our
midst is a proof that, so far from having our humanity, our political
position, our very civilization itself swallowed up in the love of the
almighty dollar, as has been predicted of us by foreign wiseacres, we
have been aroused to our danger and to a true appreciation of the better
part of existence; which is itself an evidence of the elasticity and the
recuperative energy of our social system.

In literature our progress is not so flattering. In its effects upon
civilization a literature can only be judged by that portion of it which
touches the popular heart, which descends to the humblest fireside, and
is most eagerly sought after by the ploughboy and the operative. All
other, however brilliant it may be--and the more brilliant or profound
the farther it is generally removed from the minds of the masses--is to
them but as the stars of a winter night, cold and distant, radiating
little warmth to the longing soul, too far away to aw