es' of the
heavenly city. The white-robed and entoning priests were their joy and
pride; they, as well as the cherished artists, were most frequently from
their own oppressed ranks. Religion and art were alone then democratic;
alone expounded to them the original equality of man. Thus they looked
upon these temples, which art beautified for faith, as peculiarly their
own, their refuge, their solace, their ark of safety in those times of
war and trouble. They earnestly and devoutly believed them to be the
sanctuaries of the risen God, in which dwelt his glorified Body. With
the first rays of the sun flushing with roseate hues the mystic beauty
of the temple, they congregated there to receive, in the glorious unity
of a common humanity, Him whom the heavens cannot contain--the Son of
God. They did not think, they felt; they could not reason, but they
heard the church. Naive, simple, and trusting souls, with the Virgin to
smile upon them, and the saints to pray for them.

It cannot surely be denied that art is full of indefinite and
instinctive longing for the infinite.

Poetry is full of its pining voice. Chateaubriand says:

'When we are alone with nature, the feeling of the infinite forces
itself irresistibly upon us. When the universe with its
inexhaustible variety opens before us, when we contemplate the
myriads of stars moving in ever-mystic harmony through the
limitless immensity of space, when we gaze upon the ocean mingling
with the sky in the boundless distance of the far horizon, when the
earth and sea are rocked into profound calm, and creation itself
seems wrapped in mystic contemplation--an undefinable feeling of
melancholy seizes upon us, unknown desires awaken in the soul, they
seem to call us into other countries far beyond the limits of the
known--must it not then be the vague feeling after, the dim longing
for, the infinite, which at such moments we feel strangely stirring
in the calm depths of the divining soul?'

We find the same yearning breathing through the following beautiful
poem of Mrs. Osgood's:

'As plains the home-sick ocean shell
Far from its own remembered sea,
Repeating, like a fairy spell,
Of love, the charmed melody
It learned within that whispering wave,
Whose wondrous and mysterious tone
Still wildly haunts its winding cave
Of pearl, with softest music-moan--

'So asks my home-sick soul