and continued weal, depending on large, deep
principles--principles deliberately elaborated and adopted by reason,
and generously embracing the whole--our life must be interpenetrated
by principle, and thence our literature must embrace the widest and
most human wants and aspirations of man. And thus, it will be our
privilege and our glory to be then the most national in our books when
we are the most universal.

IX.

USEFULNESS OF ART.

ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE INAUGURATION OF THE RHODE ISLAND ART
ASSOCIATION IN PROVIDENCE, SEPTEMBER 4, 1854.

_Gentlemen of the Rhode Island Art Association:_--

We are met to inaugurate an Association whose aim and end shall be the
encouragement and culture of Art. A most high end--among the highest
that men can attempt; an end that never can be entertained except by
men of the best breed. There is no art among savages, none among
barbarians. Barbarism and art are adversary terms. When men capable of
civilization ascend into it, art manifests itself an inevitable
accompaniment, an indispensable aid to human development. I will say
further, that in a people the capacity to be cultivated involves the
capacity, nay, the necessity of art. And still further, that those
nations that have been or are preeminent on the earth, are preeminent
in art. Nay, more, that a nation cannot attain to and maintain
eminence without being proficient in art; and that to abstract from a
people its artists were not merely to pluck the flowers from its
branches; it were to cut off its-deep roots.

Who is the artist?

He who embodies, in whatever mode,--so that they be visible or
audible, and thus find entrance to the mind,--conceptions of the
beautiful, is an artist. The test and characteristic of the artistic
nature are superior sensibility to the beautiful. Unite to this the
faculties and the will to give form to the impressions and emotions
that are the fruit of this susceptibility, and you have the artist.
Whether he shall embody his conception in written verse, in marble, in
stone, in sound, on the canvas, that will depend on each one's
individual aptitudes. Generic, common, indispensable to all is the
superior sensibility to the beautiful. In this lies the essence of the
artist.

The beautiful and the perfect being, if not identical, in closest
consanguinity, the artist's is an important, a great function. The
artist must receive into his mind, or engender in his mind's native
richness,