milk a cow; she let the poultry into the garden; she
generally spoilt whatever part of the dinner she took in charge;
she broke crockery; she dropped our biggest pitcher into the well;
and--except with her needle and those little wooden instruments for
purse-making--was as unserviceable a member of society as any young
lady in the land. There was no other sort of efficiency about her. Yet
everybody was kind to Priscilla; everybody loved her and laughed at her
to her face, and did not laugh behind her back; everybody would have
given her half of his last crust, or the bigger share of his plum-cake.
These were pretty certain indications that we were all conscious of a
pleasant weakness in the girl, and considered her not quite able to look
after her own interests, or fight her battle with the world.

* * * * *

From "The Marble Faun."

=_299._= SCULPTURE: ART AND ARTISTS.

A sculptor, indeed, to meet the demands which our preconceptions make
upon him, should be even more indispensably a poet than those who deal
in measured verse and rhyme. His material, or instrument, which serves
him in the stead of shifting and transitory language, is a pure, white,
undecaying substance. It insures immortality to whatever is wrought in
it, and therefore makes it a religious obligation to commit no idea
to its mighty guardianship, save such as may repay the marble for
its faithful care, its incorruptible fidelity, by warming it with an
etherial life. Under this aspect, marble assumes a sacred character; and
no man should dare to touch it unless he feels within himself a certain
consecration and a priesthood, the only evidence of which, for the
public eye, will be the high treatment of heroic subjects, or the
delicate evolution of spiritual, through material beauty....

No ideas such as the foregoing--no misgivings suggested by
them--probably troubled the self complacency of most of these clever
sculptors. Marble, in their view, had no such sanctity as we impute to
it....

Yet we love the artists, in every kind; even these, whose merits we are
not quite able to appreciate. Sculptors, painters, crayon sketchers, or
whatever branch of aesthetics they adopted, were certainly pleasanter
people, as we saw them that evening, than the average whom we meet
in ordinary society. They were not wholly confined within the sordid
compass of practical life; they had a pursuit which, if followed
faithfully out, would