nd a face paled by the
celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face
upward, and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not
impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the regions of
Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those
heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house--those rounded-backs
and stupid, weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done
the rough work of the world--those homes with their tin pans, their
brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this
world there are so many of these common, coarse people, who have no
picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we should
remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of
our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a
world of extremes. Therefore let Art always remind us of them;
therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a
life to the faithful representing of commonplace things--men who see
beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly
the light of heaven falls on them.

There are few prophets in the world--few sublimely beautiful women--few
heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such
rarities; I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day
fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great
multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to
make way with kindly courtesy. Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or
romantic criminals half so frequent as your common laborer, who gets
his own bread, and eats it vulgarly, but creditably, with his own
pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy
connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a
vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal
in red scarf and green feathers; more needful that my heart should
swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the
faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman
of my own parish, who is, perhaps, rather too corpulent, and in other
respects is not an Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroes
whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sublim