Volume I Part 23 (1/2)

TO ----

'_Fishkill, 25 Nov, 1844_--You would have been happy as I have been in the company of the mountains They are companions both bold and calm They exhilarate and they satisfy To live, too, on the bank of the great river so long, has been the realization of a drea, yet this has been my life'

'After they were all in bed,' she writes from the ”Manse,” in Concord,

'I went out, and walked till near twelve Theel race, in every sense; their life so full, so hushed; not a leaf stirred'

'You say that nature does not keep her promise; but, surely, she satisfies us now and then for the tiress, but here and there she speaks out a sentence, full in its cadence, complete in its structure; it occupies, for the tiht We have no care for promises Will you say it is the superficialness of my life, that I have known hours with men and nature, that bore their proper fruit,--all present ate and were filled, and there were taken up of the fragments twelve baskets full? Is it because of the superficialheart, that I can say this?'

'Only through emotion do we know thee, Nature! We lean upon thy breast, and feel its pulses vibrate to our own That is knowledge, for that is love Thought will never reach it'

ART

There are persons to whoallery is everywhere a home In this country, the antique is known only by plaster casts, and by drawings

The BOSTON ATHENaeUM,--on whose sunny roof and beautiful chambers may the benediction of centuries of students rest with mine!--added to its library, in 1823, a small, but excellent museu dictated, it is said, by no less an adviser than Canova The Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venuses, Diana, the head of the Phidian Jove, Bacchus, Antinous, the Torso Hercules, the Discobolus, the Gladiator Borghese, the Apollino,--all these, and ustus Thorndike It is much that one man should have power to confer on so

To these were soon added a heroic line of antique busts, and, at last, by Horatio Greenough, the Night and Day of Michel Angelo Here was old Greece and old Italy brought bodily to New England, and a verification given to all our drea-rooallery for a summer exhibition This was also done, and a new pleasure was invented for the studious, and a new home for the solitary The Bris, chiefly of the French and Italian s of Guercino, Salvator Rosa, and other masters The separate chamber in which these collections were at first contained, aret and a few of her friends, ere lovers of these works

First led perhaps by Goethe, afterwards by the love she herself conceived for theelo and Raphael She read, pen in hand, Quatremere de Quincy's lives of those two painters, and I have her transcripts and commentary before me She read Condivi, Vasari, Benvenuto Cellini, Duppa, Fuseli, and Von Waagen,--great and sn of Michel, the four voluns, were in the rich portfolios of her most intimate friend 'I have been very happy,' she writes, 'with four hundred and seventy designs of Raphael in my possession for a week'

These fine entertainments were shared with many admirers, and, as I now remember them, certain enius of these Italians Our walls were hung with prints of the Sistine frescoes; ere all petty collectors; and prints of Correggio and Guercino took the place, for the time, of epics and philosophy

In the suhtfully adorned with the Allston Gallery; and the sculptures of our coht hither The following lines were addressed by Margaret to the Orpheus:--

'CRAWFORD'S ORPHEUS

'Each Orpheus must to the abyss descend, For only thus the poet can be wise,-- Must make the sad Persephone his friend, And buried love to second life arise; Again his lovelife too true; For what he sought below has passed above, Already done is all that he would do; Must tune all being with his single lyre; Must melt all rocks free from their primal pain, Must search all nature with his one soul's fire; Must bind anew all forms in heavenly chain: If he already sees what heview'

Margaret's love of art, like that of most cultivated persons in this country, was not at all technical, but truly a sympathy with the artist, in the protest which his work pronounced on the deformity of our daily manners; her co-perception with him of the eloquence of form; her aspiration with him to a fairer life As soon as her conversation ran into the mysteries of manipulation and artistic effect, it was less trustworthy I remember that in the first times when I chanced to see pictures with her, I listened reverently to her opinions, and endeavored to see what she saw But, on several occasions, finding uide, and to believe, at last, that her taste in works of art, though honest, was not on universal, but on idiosyncratic, grounds As it has proved one of the most difficult problems of the practical astronomer to obtain an achromatic telescope, so an achromatic eye, one of the most needed, is also one of the rarest instruments of criticism

She was very susceptible to pleasurable stiht in details of forination were easily stienial activity, and she erroneously thanked the artist for the pleasing ehts that rose in her h capable of it, she did not always bring that highest tribunal to a work of art, nareatness in the object can satisfy Yet the opinion was often orth hearing on its own account, though it ht be wide of the ht to beautiful objects a fresh and appreciating love; and her written notes, especially on sculpture, I found always original and interesting Here are soust, 1840, which she sent me in manuscript:--

'Here are many objects worth study There is Thorwaldsen's Byron This is the truly beautiful, the ideal Byron This head is quite free froures most likenesses of him, as it did hi, all-co

Even the heavy style of the hair, too closely curled for grace, is favorable to the expression of concentrated life

While looking at this head, you learn to account for the grand failure in the scheme of his existence The line of the cheek and chin are here, as usual, of unrivalled beauty

'The bust of Napoleon is here also, and will naturally be named, in connection with that of Byron, since the one in letters, the other in arms, represented more fully than any other the tendency of their tiave it a chance for reaction There was another point of rese of the two, perfectly corresponding with that of the internal, a sense of which peculiarity drew on Byron some ridicule I mean that it was the intention of nature, that neither should ever grow fat, but remain a Cassius in the commonwealth And both these heads are taken while they were at an early age, and so thin as to be still beautiful This head of Napoleon is of a stern beauty A head must be of a style either very stern or very chaste, to reat force of will and withholding of resources, giving a sense of depth below depth, which we call sternness; or else thereas froh every lineament, which drives far off or converts all baser natures Napoleon's head is of the first description; it is stern, and not only so, but ruthless Yet this ruthlessness excites no aversion; the artist has caught its true character, and given us here the Attila, the instru on it, caently of his crie of God, but in His eyes, those crimes Were virtues?”

His brows are tense and dareat future, careless of the black and white stones; and even when you turn to the voluptuous beauty of the , that Russia's snows, and edy that must naturally follow the appearance of such an actor You turn fro that he is a product not of the day, but of the ages, and that the ages e him

'Near him is a head of Ennius, very intellectual; self-centred and self-fed; but wrung and gnawed by unceasing thoughts