rogress of art in the
spirit world; and would be enabled to depict marvels of landscapes, and
the seraphic beauty of the human face with its grace and perfection of
form, as it meets us in this artistic land.

Yon ask if we have galleries of art here. I should think so: art-love is
immortal! You do not suppose that Benjamin West, Washington Allston,
Henry Inman, Copely, Stuart, and we Americans who loved our art, would be
satisfied with laying down the brush, and would have contented ourselves
with singing and playing on cymbals constantly for the hundred years or
so that we've been here? Now, where there is a will there is a way, and
having the will, we have found the way to exercise the genius which God
gave us.

Speaking of music, the gift is cultivated here to an extent that would
set the _dilettanti_ of earth wild with ecstasy!

_Music, Poetry, Art, Oratory_, and _Scientific Research_, form the
principal occupations of the beings in this immortal world of ours, and
language is incapable of conveying an idea of the perfection which our
noble and glorious faculties have attained.

Art is about to undergo a revolution. At present too much attention is
given to the literal rendering of a fact, and imagination, which is
merely a faculty for reaching the immaterial, is checked; but ere long
painters will turn their attention to representing scenes in spirit life,
and the inspiration which attended the old masters when they gave wings
to their fancy and cut loose from identical imitation, will return.

Let the camera and the photograph reproduce the exact outline and
minutiae, but let the artist paint with the pencil of imagination and
inspiration! Only permit imagination to have root in the material world.
As no man can become a good angel who has not developed his physical
nature in harmony with his spiritual, so neither painter nor medium can
represent the artistic beauties of the natural world, nor of the spirit
world, unless he has had a good physical training. It is only through the
_physical_ that the imagination can express itself with beauty and
correctness. Truth is beauty, and is always proportionate; the light
equalizing the dark, precisely as in the perfection of art a mass of
shadow is balanced by a proportion of light.

One of the most agreeable places of rest or there-abouts is the artists'
rendezvous--a building larger than St. Peter's at Home, magnificent in
structure, and filled with wonderful pai