of the heroic memories should in all cases, it seems to us,
be committed to the plastic arts, and not, as some would advise, to any
less tangible witness to our love for them. It is true that a community
might endow a charity, to be called forever by some name that would
celebrate them, or might worthily record its reverence for them by
purchase of a scholarship to be given in our heroes' names to
generations of struggling scholars of the place. But the poor we have
always with us; while this seems the rare occasion meant for the plastic
arts to supply our need of beautiful architecture and sculpture, and to
prove their right to citizenship among us, by showing themselves
adequate to express something of the spirit of the new order we have
created here. Their effort need not, however, be toward novel forms of
expression. That small part of our literature which has best answered
the want of our national life has been the most jealous in its regard
for the gospels of art, and only incoherent mediums and false prophets
have disdained revelation. Let the plastic arts, in proving that they
have suffered the change which has come upon races, ethics, and ideas in
this new world, interpret for us that simple and direct sense of the
beautiful which lies hidden in the letter of use. There is the great,
overgrown, weary town of Workdays, which inadequately struggled at the
time of our national aesthetic sensation, in all its newspapers, pulpits,
and rostrums, with the idea of a monument to the regiments it sent to
the war. The evident and immediate want of Workdays is a park or public
garden, in which it can walk about, and cool and restore itself. Why
should not the plastic arts suggest that the best monument which
Workdays could build would be this park, with a great triumphal gateway
inscribed to its soldiers, and adorned with that sculpture and
architecture for which Workdays can readily pay? The flourishing village
of Spindles, having outgrown the days of town-pumps and troughs, has
not, in spite of its abundant water-power, a drop of water on its public
ways to save its operatives from drunkenness or its dogs from madness. O
plastic arts! give Spindles a commemorative fountain, which, taking a
little music from the mills, shall sing its heroes forever in drops of
health, refreshment, and mercy. In the inquiring town of Innovation,
successive tides of doubt and revival and spiritualism have left the
different religious sects w