servile copyings of the actual shapes of reality, are
not the proper objects of art. To form a master work of art, the idea
symbolized must be pure and noble; the technical execution, faultless.
No heavier censure can, however, be passed upon an artist, than that he
possesses only the technic or rhetoric of art, without having penetrated
to its subtle essence of forming thought.

Man is chiefly taught through _symbolism_. Living in a symbolic world of
sensuous emblems, he seeks in them a substitute for the wondrous powers
of immediate cognition which he lost in his fall. His highest
destination is _symbolical_, for is he not made in the Divine image?
Through the symbolism of the matter is the soul taught its first lessons
in the school of life: when it is known and felt that nature is but the
symbol of the Great Spirit, the instinct of our own immortality awakes.
In the Old Covenant, the twilight of faith was studded with the starry
splendor of a marvellous symbolism; and the new era of the ascending and
ever-brightening dawn still bears on its front the glittering morning
star of symbolic Christian art.

Notwithstanding its earthly intermixture, however it may have wandered
from its true source, however sensuous and worthless it may have become,
art, in its essence, is still divine. Men devoted to the pursuit of mere
material well being, have been too long in the habit of regarding poetry
and the arts as mere recreations, to be taken up at spare moments,
pursued when we have nothing better to do; as a relief for the ennui of
idleness, or an ornament for the centre table; without remembering how
many good and great men have given up their whole lives to its
advancement; without considering into how many hearts it has borne its
soothing lessons of faith and love.

Men look upon art as if it were to be pursued merely for the sake of
art, for the egotistic pleasure of the artist, and not as a moral power
full of responsibility and dignity. We might as well suppose that
science is to be pursued merely for the sake of science, that we are to
think only that we may think. But while everything has its determinate
end in the lower world of matter, concurring in its degree to the life
of the whole; can there exist faculties and tendencies without aim in
the soul; permanent, regular, and general facts without a final cause?
Can art exist as an accidental fact in the bosom of society? Is it not
rather an important means for the