cut features, the mantling color, the radiant expression, of such a face as one may see once in a year or a lifetime. The dreary, drizzling, colorless day sets off the azure and vermilion of its evening. The heavy, ill-proportioned features, the blunt lines and torpid expression, of a thousand faces, contribute power to the one face of dazzling beauty. And in the case of beauty, as elsewhere, nature is most bountiful to him who appreciates her gifts, and who, by long, resolute, concentrated study, makes them his own. Were that vague, monotonous loveliness a characteristic of nature, man might cast on the world a heedless and wandering gaze. Its beauty would not vanish; there would be nothing to unvail, nothing to be discovered. But now the choicest natural beauties are momentary glances, evanescent as glorious; nature's smiles have to be watched and waited for; the eye must train itself to see, the mind to remember. Doubt it not, the most worthy student of nature, he who shows for the works of God the most pure and reasonable reverence, is not he who pays to the beauty of the world a general, indiscriminate admiration, but he who has listened well to nature's voice, who has learned to distinguish her degrees of beauty, who has been handed from the lichen to the daisy, from the daisy to the heatherbell, from the heather-bell to the lily, from the lily to the rose, until, passing from loveliness to loveliness, he has at last attained to such glimpses of the purest, highest beauty, as might touch the eye of an angel with rapturous fire. Here, of course, one man is originally gifted more exquisitely than another: and he who, to a peculiar sensibility to beauty, adds a rare perseverance in its culture, is the man who will excel as a painter of the second class. He is the commissioned of his fellow-men to be a spy upon nature: to visit her in her solitudes; to steal upon her at eventide

when she is shedding her faintest, tenderest purples into the mountain valleys; to mark the streaming of the light over unseen mists in the gorges of remote hills; to trace the glittering cloud edges, as they break into white fire in the glance of the lightning. If he deals with human subjects, it is his to note the manifestation of mighty and noble passion; to arrest forever the gleam of strange, flitting light which glances along the features, when a sudden throb of uncontrollable emotion strikes the heart. He goes, too, into the paths of common life, looking there for what is honorable, and lovely, and of good report. Whatever he deems worthy of choice, he paints. But he is not original save in the exercise of choice. Once give him his subject, and he paints it with literal exactness.

Whole schools of painting belong to this second class, conspicuous among them, the Dutch and Flemish. Ruysdael and Cuyp are admirable examples. Mr. Ruskin speaks of the works of Ruysdael as furniture pictures, void of all the higher attributes of Art. Neither for Cuyp has he any great affection. Were it not that profound stupidity has no tendency to modesty, this fact might have made it impossible for critics of Mr. Ruskin to tell the world that all he cares for is finish, and that for its own sake. But this by the way. Be the pictures of Ruysdael and Cuyp what they may, they have been long, widely, and profoundly popular; and while adducing them as examples of their class, I would point to them also as incontestably proving our second class of painters fitted to exercise a very powerful influence upon the human mind. It seems impossible for an unsophisticated mind not to be arrested and delighted by the works of Ruysdael. Yet wherefore is it so? Wherein lies their charm? If you wandered bodily by that wood beside the moor, with the sparse sun

beams struggling here and there through its foliage-if your eye rested on that moorland, bleak and brown, as it actually presented itself to the eye of Ruysdael, with its bit of black road, and its one pool so dead and murky would you not hurry on, glancing carelessly at the whole scene, uninduced even by that ruin, seen by the struggling sunlight through the trees, to linger for a moment? Or if you stood by the original of this torrent, in another picture, with one or two uninteresting cottages on the hill side above, a few larches, somewhat tattered looking, on the river bank, and a broken stem or two lying across the current, would you think the scene, though perhaps deserving a look, worthy of being long and heedfully observed? Surely not. Yet here you are enchained. If not enraptured, you at least experience an intense pleasure. Why, I say, is this? Is it not because a touch of nature makes the whole world kin, and here nature is rendered in all the plainness of her truth? The slightest effort of imagination bears you away to Ruysdael's moorland, spreading bleak and brown under those sullen, lowering clouds. His earth has the very look of nature's surfaces-not glazed, not rolled out in smooth uniformity, the green all enamel, the black all jet, but rough and fretted, as nature's surface always is, with its millions of points, singly invisible, of grass-blade, reed, and heather. His clouds have the mass and depth, the light and shade, of cumulous clouds, and that look of laggard dreariness, which those clouds wear on a chill, gloomy day, threatening rain. His torrent, though it takes from the dull gray of the sky a dissatisfying bluish dimness, where you looked for bright, leaping spray, is yet true under its own sky, and you feel that those larches actually grow by that grumbling northern stream. Limited as Ruysdael's range may be, you cannot but see

that what landscapes he selected he painted, so far as bare truth was concerned, with consummate power. If you find, as I do, any fascination in the particular scenes he depicts, he will appear to you to have done no mean work.

For Cuyp, too, let me speak a word. He must, indeed, have been, in some sense, a dull man. If nature could be consulted, she would surely declare the man who could see and love but one of her aspects, who was contented to paint during his whole life one of her innumerable phases, a votary not worth having. I do not remember any picture of Cuyp's, and pictures by Cuyp are to be found in every collection, in which there was not a broad yellow light streaming from the left. Always, I think, that light touched, with a faint copper color, the tops of stately cumulous clouds, piled up, their domes towards sunset, in the repose of evening. Yet Cuyp's monotony has not deprived him of popularity, nor ought it entirely to have done so. There was a power in his dullness. He set himself to paint his one effect with unflagging assiduity; and he painted it, as it appears to me, with consummate suc

cess.

This second class of painters is the widest of any. It embraces all the men of unquestionable talent, but not high genius. I hold them in great honor. In their inability to paint more than one effect variously modified, I find an attestation of the infinitude by which the works of God excel the works of man. Their endowment is certainly beyond the common; their perseverance is indomitable; yet they spend their whole lives in attempting to trace and imitate one touch of the Divine finger! There are of course many living painters who belong to this class. Cooper, Lee, Cooke, and others without end, able, meritorious artists, are men possessing, so to speak, one piece

of knowledge. You can tell precisely what each sees in nature. Lee paints everything as if it had been "washed, just washed, in a shower.” He takes his palette to the

fields in the intervals of the showers that drift before the west winds of June. Green, gray, blue, — these are his colors. Cooper is as fond of yellow sunlight as Cuyp, whom, indeed, he seems to have closely studied. His cows are of the color of tortoise-shell, and you may be sure of the dreamy yellow of afternoon on his skies and streams. Cooke keeps to nearly the same color as Cooper, with the modification enforced by the nature of his marine views. A pale yellow illumination is about all his skies and clouds, -now and then, perhaps, fading into gray.

Smith. Allow me to interrupt you for a moment. I once happened to look at a landscape in this Academy, by which I was not a little puzzled. The sky, the clouds, the trees, were certainly the painting of Lee. But where had Lee got those yellow lights, those broad pale gleams, changing the tone of the whole picture? The cattle, on the other hand, the yellow tones here and there, were Cooper's, but how had Cooper stolen a march upon Lee, whence had he got the west wind shower to wash up his picture? A glance at the catalogue resolved the mystery. The landscape was Lee's: the cattle were Cooper's.

Thom. Thank you. The case is precisely in point. I have only to add, as to this class of painters, that all which has been said of them as landscapists applies to them, with obvious modification, as painters of life. Caravaggio's gamblers answer precisely to Cuyp's evenings and Cooper's

COWS.

There is a third class of painters, the inventors, the poets. It is an inalienable attribute of man that he can modify, recombine, adorn nature. He casts a gleam from