a writer who conveys
typical meanings, may express them in myriads. He cannot disentangle all
the hues which commingle into the light he seeks to cast upon truth;
and therefore the great masters of this enchanted soil,--Fairyland of
Fairyland, Poetry imbedded beneath Poetry,--wisely leave to each mind to
guess at such truths as best please or instruct it. To have asked Goethe
to explain the "Faust" would have entailed as complex and puzzling an
answer as to have asked Mephistopheles to explain what is beneath the
earth we tread on. The stores beneath may differ for every passenger;
each step may require a new description; and what is treasure to the
geologist may be rubbish to the miner. Six worlds may lie under a sod,
but to the common eye they are but six layers of stone.

Art in itself, if not necessarily typical, is essentially a suggester of
something subtler than that which it embodies to the sense. What Pliny
tells us of a great painter of old, is true of most great painters;
"their works express something beyond the works,"--"more felt than
understood." This belongs to the concentration of intellect which high
art demands, and which, of all the arts, sculpture best illustrates.
Take Thorwaldsen's Statue of Mercury,--it is but a single figure, yet
it tells to those conversant with mythology a whole legend. The god has
removed the pipe from his lips, because he has already lulled to sleep
the Argus, whom you do not see. He is pressing his heel against his
sword, because the moment is come when he may slay his victim. Apply the
principle of this noble concentration of art to the moral writer: he,
too, gives to your eye but a single figure; yet each attitude, each
expression, may refer to events and truths you must have the learning to
remember, the acuteness to penetrate, or the imagination to conjecture.
But to a classical judge of sculpture, would not the exquisite pleasure
of discovering the all not told in Thorwaldsen's masterpiece be
destroyed if the artist had engraved in detail his meaning at the base
of the statue? Is it not the same with the typical sense which the
artist in words conveys? The pleasure of divining art in each is the
noble exercise of all by whom art is worthily regarded.

We of the humbler race not unreasonably shelter ourselves under the
authority of the masters, on whom the world's judgment is pronounced;
and great names are cited, not with the arrogance of equals, but with
the humilit