MEDON. When I am serious and poetical, which is not often, I will not allow you to be perverse and ironical! ALDA. See, here is a passage which I have just found among Mrs. Austin's beautiful specimens of translation: "The critic of art ought to keep in view, not only the capabilities, but the proper objects of art. Not all that art can accomplish ought she to attempt. It is from this cause alone, and because we have lost sight of these principles, that art among us has become more extensive and difficult, and less effective and perfect." * MEDON. Very well, and very true :-but who shall bring a rule and compass to measure the capabilities of art, and define its proper objects? May there not exist in the depths or heights of philosophy and art, truths yet to be revealed, as there are stars in heaven, whose light has not yet reached the naked eye? and why should not criticism have its telescope for truth, as well as its microscope for error? Art may be finite; but who shall fix its limits, and * Lessing. "thus far shalt thou go?" say, There are those who regard the distant as the unattainable, the unknown as the unexisting, the actual as the necessary;-are you one of such, O you of little faith! For my own part, I look forward to a new era in sculpture. I believe that the purely natural and the purely ideal are one, and susceptible of forms and modifications as yet untried. For Nature, the infinite, sits within her tabernacle, not made by human hands, and Genius and Love are the cherubim, to whom it is permitted to look into her unveiled eyes, and reflect their light; Art is the priestess of her divine mysteries, and Criticism, the door-keeper of her temple, should be Janus-headed, looking forward as well as backward. Reason estimates what has been done; Imagination alone divines what may be done. But I am losing myself in these reveries. To attempt something new, -perfectly new in style and conception-and spend, like Dannecker, eight years in working out that conception-and then perhaps eight years more waiting for a purchaser, and this in a country where one must eat and pay taxes—truly, it is not easy. 135 SKETCHES OF ART, LITERATURE AND CHARACTER. III. MEDON. You have been frowning and musing in your chair for the last half-hour, with your fore-finger between the leaves of your book-where were your thoughts? ALDA. They were far-very far! I am afraid that I appear very stupid? MEDON. O not at all! you know there are stars which appear dim and fixed to the eye, while they are taking flights and making revolutions, which imagination cannot follow nor science compute. ALDA. Upon my word, you are very sublimely ironical-my thoughts were not quite so far. MEDON. May one beg, or borrow them ?What is your book? ALDA. Mrs. Austin's "Characteristics of Goethe." I came upon a passage which sent back my thoughts to Weimar. I was again in his house; the faces, the voices of his grandchildren were around me; the room in which he studied, the bed in which he slept, the old chair in which he died,—and, above all, her in whose arms he died—from whose lips I heard the detail of his last moments For Goethe-I should as soon think of weeping because the sun set yesterday, which now is pouring its light around me! Our tears are for those who suffer, for those who die, for those who are absent, for those who are cold or lost-not for those who cannot die, who cannot suffer,-who must be, to the end of time, a presence and an existence among us! No. But I was reading here, among the Characteristics of Goethe, who certainly “knew all qualities, with a learned spirit in human dealings," that he was not only the quick discerner and most cordial hater of all affectation;-but even the unconscious affectation-the nature de convention, the taught, the artificial, the acquired in manner or character, though it were meritorious in itself, he always detected, and it appeared to impress him disagreeably. Stay, I will read you the passage-here it is. "Even virtue, laboriously and painfully acquired, was distasteful to him. I might almost affirm, that a faulty but vigorous character, if it had any real native qualities as its basis, was regarded by him with more indulgence and respect than one which, at no moment of its existence, is genuine; which is incessantly under the most unamiable constraint, and consequently imposes a painful constraint on others. Oh,' said he, sighing, on such occasions, if they had but the heart |