either spiritual or civic, either for religion or the State; and, even where individuals encouraged and paid for the works, it was in a feeling of community that artists conceived them; and it was devotion to such feeling they carried into brave and fearless execution. It kept genius free from the slavery of personality; for it bore the artist away from himself, and it made him independent of a patron: so that, whether he worked in the service of worship, of patriotism, or of pleasure, his consciousness was the consciousness of a people, and his "service was perfect freedom." Out of such spirit arose the sublime cathedral, the magnificent college, the stately senate-house, the imposing law-courts, and the splendor of the ruler's residence. Painting, in modern art, takes the place of sculpture in ancient art; and as in ancient art the grandest statues were those of gods, demigods, and heroes, so in modern art the grander pictures are those of saints, patriarchs, and prophets.

Original and creative power in public art seems not likely to re-appear, because the conditions are not likely to return which are necessary to its genuine and spontaneous activity. But we can still love the beautiful which is embodied; and even the faintest mediums which give us reflections of it are a social good. Public art, in our day, must more or less wed itself to utility; but, even in this relation, the culture of public taste is of the utmost importance and advantage. Much wealth is wasted, or worse than wasted, on superfluities, which are supposed to be ornaments, but which usually are deformities, offensive to the cultivated, and corrupting to the ignorant. Art, like knowledge, must in our day be diffusive; and it is in its diffusive action that we see its best influence. This becomes more and more apparent in villages, cities, and rural districts. Ancient and medieval art was magnificent in separate objects; the sentiment of modern æsthetics goes more into genial and general effects. Very beautiful to the eye, in our day, is a well-cultivated district, a pleasant and retired village, or that mingling of grace, brilliancy, and splendor which we witness in the finest modern cities. But, unquestionably, the art of our day is not the best ideal of our pub

lic life. The artists of these times who most affect us seem to be those that give us the most direct impressions of nature, and that come the nearest to our social and domestic sentiments.

It would seem as if the home was likely to be the sphere on which the beautiful in art will, henceforth, be the most lavished. Nor is the home unworthy of what genius best can do. Home is the sanctuary of humanity. There domestic life opens. The baptismal celebration of infant life is there; and there, too, the solemn festivity of betrothal and of wedding. There, also, is the suppressed moan by the couch of the dying and the loved, and there the vacant spaces that tell of the absent and the lost. The love of the beautiful, which in a noble and truthful spirit builds and adorns a home, occasions no loss upon a scale of the lowest realism; and that community of spirit in the love of beauty which causes the surface of a country to blossom as the rose, and which crowns its cities with majesty and grace, seems like the universal presence of a visible benediction. To this gracious result all can minister; the wealthy out of their abundance, and those not rich according to their means. The pomp and show of vanity are costly beauty can be had for little. Pine boards or bricks can be shaped into grace as well as granite or marble; a few shrubs and flowers, with the kindly help of earth and heaven, of sunshine and showers, will prosper without money. Prints, not expensive, will give hints of fancies that dreamed celestial dreams; and books, easily procured, will reveal the thoughts of mighty souls. But to the blind and deaf of heart there is neither vision nor revelation.

Thus, again, there is the beautiful in thought, and there is great delight in the love of it. The contemplation of great ideas, in any region of science or speculation, of ideas that imply order, eternity, infinity, must have a bliss within it that only a mind large enough for the ideas could endure or could enjoy. There is a beauty of idea independent of sensation: it comes to the artist in pure image, it comes to the thinker in pure thought. The great conception of Gibbon amidst the ruins of the Colosseum-to write the history of

"The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"-must have seemed as a sun new-risen on the horizon of his life; a sun that illumined with invigorating brightness the whole day of his gigantic toil. But more resplendent that holy and solemn orb, centred amidst infinity and mystery, which arose on the spirit of Milton, in the first idea of his august and angelic song; that holy and solemn orb by whose light he walked pilgrim of creation that he was - from the brink of "chaos and old night," on to the day of Calvary and the day of Doom. Even to those whose work is to have its power through the senses, the beauty is yet divinest while it dwells in mere conception. We stand before a Virgin of Raphael, and through the hazy atmosphere of our lower imagination it pours a marvellous light of sanctity and loveliness. But could we have seen it through the inner atmosphere of Raphael's own imagination, in the splendor of its spiritual ante-type, it might show us that the actual picture is not farther above our capacity of creation, than it is below the ideal picture of his conception. The thinker, as well as the artist, has this joy of idea; and, if not so passionate, more profound. beauty belongs to truth in itself, and for itself. truth that enters the soul of a thinker is the dawn of a new joy. To find truth after many days, -after watching, toil, and waiting; to emerge from the temporal and the changeable into that higher sphere of thought, where truth immutable abides, without a past, without a future, is to know a beauty so calm and fair, that, could we reach it, we would seem to pass from darkness to light, and from the illusions of existence to its essence. Even the mere aspiration, the mere endeavor, after it, brings exalted satisfaction, and is in itself a great reward. People speak of the disappointment which waits upon the search for truth. The people who speak so are themselves false and shallow: there is no disappointment in the search for truth, or in the love of it; in this very love the spirit of truth is already an indwelling and ennobling power. Language can reveal the beautiful with more variety than can any other medium; especially by means of poetry, which includes all modes of it, in nature, in art, in thought, in good

An immortal

Every ray of

ness. Genius is the element of power; but the beautiful, including the good, is the element of worth in poetry. Eloquence, too, is a species of poetry: it is poetry with a purpose. In its greatest examples, it is as immortal as poetry, and for the same reason,- that is, by the ever-living presence of the beautiful. This remains when the occasion has long passed away, and when we cease to have the smallest interest in the purpose. We care nothing at present about the dispute between Demosthenes and Eschines, but we still read the oration concerning the Crown. To the reflective and critical mind of modern times, the general persuasion is, that Catiline was rather a vulgar libertine than a great conspirator, and that Cicero overrated the power of the man and the danger of the State; but Cicero's Orations on the subject will not the less endure, or give the less delight. The death of Marie Henriette, Queen of England, is not now to any mind an event of the least importance; but no one can read Bossuet's funeral sermon on that event without being powerfully moved. I might adduce many other examples, but these will suffice. The occasion departs and is no longer of account; the purpose loses reality and interest; and yet closeness to the occasion, fitness to the purpose, are essential conditions of the beautiful in eloquence, without which no eloquence becomes immortal.

Moral beauty transcends whatever is most beautiful in nature or in art. It transcends the beauty that spreads over ocean, or that glorifies the sky; all that lies with the mist upon the mountain; all that moves with the cloud upon the lake; all that smiles in the dawn, or that burns in the sunset. Without it there is no other beauty,- no home, no temple, no pictures, no statue; for there is no hero, no saint, no worship, no kindred, nothing to stimulate aspiration, and nothing to sanctify invention. Without the sense of moral beauty, we have no consciousness of benignant power in the phenomena of nature; and then the universe is a wilderness, desolate and godless. But so it is not. In our lowest estate, we feel the beautiful, and in our degree we love it. As we are comprehended all around with bounty, so we are with beauty. It

is in the grass and flower, in the tree and torrent, in the beast and fish, in bird and butterfly; it girds us with the ocean, and it crowns us with the stars. The spirit of beauty is in the life of all; but the life of beauty thus animating creation is the spirit of goodness, the Spirit of God. Moral beauty is also in human life, in the affections that sweeten it, in the sentiments that expand it, in the principles that ennoble and sustain it, in the charities that bless it; in every generous deed or suffering, from the cup of cold water bestowed, to the chalice of martyrdom accepted. Yes, of a truth and certainty the spirit of beauty is everywhere; vital in action, lovely in manifestation, grand and fair to the eye, pleasant to the ear, genial to the feelings, calming to the brain, a cordial for the vexed spirit, ease for the tired senses; a deathless desire in the hope of a deathless life.

ART. V. PARKMAN'S JESUITS IN NORTH AMERICA. The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century. By FRANCIS PARKMAN, author of "Pioneers of France in the New World." Second Edition. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1867. In the course of his studies of the history of the first settlers and adventurers in North America, Mr. Parkman gives us, in his last volume, a narrative of the efforts of the earlier French Jesuits to convert the Indians to Christianity. The space of time covered by it is that of about a generation of men; and it embraces the whole course of a wonderful and romantic enterprise, from the arrival of Le Jeune at Quebec in 1632, until the mission was practically abandoned on account of the extermination or dispersal of the tribes among whom it had sought converts. It is the story of marvellous adventures, achieved with almost superhuman zeal and patience; carries us among scenes and people, habits of action and thought, and traits of character and passion, hitherto little known, and always imperfectly and erroneously described. The Jesuit and the savage in North America, two