uld not help regretting that one who
copied nature so well, should not prefer to represent her as she appears
in our own fresh and glorious land, instead of living in Italy and
painting Italian landscapes.

To refer again to foreign artists--before I left Florence I visited the
annual exhibition which had been opened in the Academy of the Fine Arts.
There were one or two landscapes reminding me somewhat of Cole's manner,
but greatly inferior, and one or two good portraits, and two or three
indifferent historical pictures. The rest appeared to me decidedly bad;
wretched landscapes; portraits, some of which were absolutely hideous,
stiff, ill-colored, and full of grimace.

Here at Rome, we have an American sculptor of great ability, Henry K.
Brown, who is just beginning to be talked about. He is executing a statue
of Ruth gleaning in the field of Boaz, of which the model has been ready
for some months, and is also modelling a figure of Rebecca at the Well.
When I first saw his Ruth I was greatly struck with it, but after visiting
the studios of Wyatt and Gibson, and observing their sleek imitations of
Grecian art, their learned and faultless statues, nymphs or goddesses or
gods of the Greek mythology, it was with infinite pleasure that my eyes
rested again on the figure and face of Ruth, perhaps not inferior in
perfection of form, but certainly informed with a deep human feeling which
I found not in their elaborate works. The artist has chosen the moment in
which Ruth is addressed by Boaz as she stands among the gleaners. He
quoted to me the lines of Keats, on the song of the nightingale--

"Perchance the self-same song that found a path
To the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien's corn."

She is not in tears, but her aspect is that of one who listens in sadness;
her eyes are cast down, and her thoughts are of the home of her youth, in
the land of Moab. Over her left arm hangs a handful of ears of wheat,
which she has gathered from the ground, and her right rests on the drapery
about her bosom. Nothing can be more graceful than her attitude or more
expressive of melancholy sweetness and modesty than her physiognomy. One
of the copies which the artist was executing--there were two of them--is
designed for a gentleman in Albany. Brown will shortly, or I am greatly
mistaken, achieve a high reputation among the sculptors of the time.

Rosseter, an American painter, who has passed