'though inward far we be'--even
the mournful memory of a past of celestial innocence becomes the
harbinger of a divine hope. Let the poet then still sing of the past;
like the glories of the setting sun flushing down the golden west, it
but whispers of a more glorious rise in the mythic east. The root of art
springs from the intuitions of eternal love; its leaves, flowers, and
fruit, are faith, hope, and charity. May the rapt artist ever remember
that the beauty of this earth was not intended to satisfy the
requisitions of his longing soul, but to awaken and nourish in it the
love of eternal beauty!

A golden thread of glories yet to be, twines through the woof of this
our mortal life, and by tracing its wavy lines of glittering brilliancy,
shining even through the dim symbolism of matter, many secrets of the
life to come may be divined. The arts may be regarded as significant
hieroglyphics of delights yet to be fulfilled in other spheres of being.
The living pulse of omnipotence, the heart of God, beats sensibly in the
beauty of the boundless universe; it is the fountain at which the young
immortal is to imbibe his first draught for eternity. Not that, as
erroneously held by the Pantheists, nature is God, no more than Raphael
is the pictures he paints; but assuming the existence of a God as the
creator of the worlds, what else can nature be but a revelation of God
and divine love, a visible and symbolic representation thereof in
matter; living, because His breath is life?

The following remarkable passage on the religious origin and consecutive
order of the arts occurs in De La Mennais' 'Sketch of Philosophy:'

'The temple of art is an emanation from that Divine Spirit who
fills it with Himself. It is the plastic evolution of the idea
which man has of Him, of His nature, of His ways, as manifested in
the universe. From its central sanctuary in which He, the unseen,
dwells, this temple projects, extending itself in space in every
direction; but by an opposite movement all its parts, closely
united, converge to the sanctuary, gravitating toward the central
point where their Head, their essential and primordial Reason,
dwells; they struggle to penetrate its mystic veil, to mingle with
it, to have their being in it, in order to accomplish the perfect
union of variety with unity, of the finite with the infinite.

'The art temple struggles to develop itself by a