news from earth,― revolutions that transpire, changes in state and national politics, recent accidents which have thrown individuals suddenly into the spirit world, and to recording the names, as far as possible, of persons who have deceased from earth.

Disasters that occur on sea and land are immediately telegraphed to the newspapers in Spring Garden and published for the use of the community.

It may be interesting to the curious to know that in cases like the sinking of a vessel, where fifty or a hundred individuals are suddenly ushered into the spirit world, delegates are sent out from this and other cities to meet the sufferers and offer them the hospitalities of the city, in accordance with their individual merits and degrees of development.

Our method of printing newspapers differs materially from that in vogue on earth.

Our papers might be termed photo-telegrams. A much less space is occupied by a communication of a given length than the same would require in your papers. We have a system of short-hand, understood by all, similar to that used by your telegraphic op

erator.

We have various places of public amusement, two fine theatres which are devoted to dramas originating with the inhabitants of our world, and another appropriated to the representation of dramas familiar to earth. Our places of amusement are of large capacity, hence but few are needed; and the people of this city being congenial in their natures, as many as possible like to assemble in one place.

The several actors who have been famed on earth

appear at the theatres in Spring Garden. Garrick, Kean, Kemble, Booth, Vandenhoff, Cooke, Macready, Rachel, and Mrs. Siddons, visit us from time to time.

Among our distinguished actors are many who on earth were clergymen, politicians, and of other occupations.*

* I am told that the Rev. Newland Maffit is at present a distinguished actor in the spirit world. ED.

GILBERT STUART,

ART CONVERSATION.

PEOPLE are fools in religion, and worship as divine the most stupid monstrosities ever conceived of! Only tell the masses that St. Luke, St. John, or Mary Magdalen was the author of some absurdity, which, if you or I had originated, they would scoff at, and they will clasp their hands in mute admiration oyer that miracle of art!

So it seems to me to be with Spiritualists. Drawings devoid of taste, hard, and out of proportion, are received by them with acclamations of joy, and credited, if they are figures, to Raphael, and if landscapes, to Claude Lorraine or some other great master of art.

Now I, for one, wish people would use their brains, and not be so easily gulled.

It is truly wonderful that a spirit can make a person draw a straight line who never could draw any but a crooked one. It partakes something of the miraculous, I admit; and that spirits should produce likenesses, and representations of flowers, scrolls, and ornamental designs, and unearthly landscapes, through mediums whose powers of representation and artistic talents have never been developed, is indeed marvellous! but that these drawings should be called

works of art, and looked upon as the genuine offspring of those immortal painters, is ridiculous, and a thing to be deprecated by every intelligent spirit and Spiritualist, either here or in any other world!

Why, God Almighty himself could not take a unschooled, undisciplined hand, and produce a work of art!

raw,

If a medium is content with what he has done, if he does not comprehend the faults of his work, if his eye and brain are not educated artistically, then he must stand like a machine working in a groove. Neither Phidias nor any of his descendants could inspire a high production through such means!

Now I do wish that educated artists would seek to be controlled by us spirits; or that those mediums whom we do influence would go to school, and submit to the drudgery that is necessary to give them skill in design and execution.

Then could we hope to represent something of the progress of art in the spirit world; and would be enabled to depict marvels of landscapes, and the seraphic beauty of the human face with its grace and perfection of form, as it meets us in this artistic land.

You ask if we have galleries of art here. I should think so: art-love is immortal! You do not suppose that Benjamin West, Washington Allston, Henry Inman, Copely, Stuart, and we Americans who loved our art, would be satisfied with laying down the brush, and would have contented ourselves with singing and playing on cymbals constantly for the hundred years or so that we've been here? Now, where there is a will there is a way, and having the will, we have

found the way to exercise the genius which God gave us.

Speaking of music, the gift is cultivated here to an extent that would set the dilettanti of earth wild with ecstacy!

Music, Poetry, Art, Oratory, and Scientific Research, form the principal occupations of the beings in this immortal world of ours, and language is incapable of conveying an idea of the perfection which our noble and glorious faculties have attained.

Art is about to undergo a revolution. At present too much attention is given to the literal rendering of a fact, and imagination, which is merely a faculty for reaching the immaterial, is checked; but ere long painters will turn their attention to representing scenes in spirit life, and the inspiration which attended the old masters when they gave wings to their fancy and cut loose from identical imitation, will return.

Let the camera and the photograph reproduce the exact outline and minutiae, but let the artist paint with the pencil of imagination and inspiration! Only permit imagination to have root in the material world. As no man can become a good angel who has not developed his physical nature in harmony with his spiritual, so neither painter nor medium can represent the artistic beauties of the natural world, nor of the spirit world, unless he has had a good physical training. It is only through the physical that the imagination can express itself with beauty and correctness. Truth is beauty, and is always proportionate; the light equalizing the dark, precisely as in the per