btlety, and unostentatious will, involved in
the ordinary process of steel engraving; that process of which engravers
themselves now with doleful voices deplore the decline, and with
sorrowful hearts expect the extinction, after their own days?

By the way--my friends of the field of steel,--you need fear nothing of
the kind. What there is of mechanical in your work; of habitual and
thoughtless, of vulgar or servile--for that, indeed, the time has come;
the sun will burn it up for you, very ruthlessly; but what there is of
human liberty, and of sanguine life, in finger and fancy, is kindred of
the sun, and quite inextinguishable by him. He is the very last of
divinities who would wish to extinguish it. With his red right hand,
though full of lightning coruscation, he will faithfully and tenderly
clasp yours, warm blooded; you will see the vermilion in the
flesh-shadows all the clearer; but your hand will not be withered. I
tell you--(dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well)--a
square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that ever
were dipped in acid (or left half-washed afterwards, which is saying
much)--only it must be man's engraving; not machine's engraving. You
have founded a school on patience and labor--only. That school must soon
be extinct. You will have to found one on thought, which is Phoenician
in immortality and fears no fire. Believe me, photography can do against
line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against
sculpture. That, and no more. You are too timid in this matter; you are
like Isaac in that picture of Mr. Schnorr's in the last number of this
Journal, and with Teutonically metaphysical precaution, shade your eyes
from the sun with your back to it. Take courage; turn your eyes to it
in an aquiline manner; put more sunshine on your steel, and less burr;
and leave the photographers to their Phoebus of Magnesium wire.

54. Not that I mean to speak disrespectfully of magnesium. I honor it to
its utmost fiery particle (though I think the soul a fierier one); and I
wish the said magnesium all comfort and triumph; nightly-lodging in
lighthouses, and utter victory over coal gas. Could Titian but have
known what the gnomes who built his dolomite crags above Cadore had
mixed in the make of them,--and that one day--one night, I mean--his
blue distances would still be seen pure blue, by light got out of his
own mountains!

Light out of limestone--color out o