illating between earth and heaven;
there where we expect truth, we see conceit; there where we want
little, much is given--now a blank eyed riddle,--dark with excess of
self,--now a giant thought--vast but repulsive,--and now angel
visitors startling us with wisdom and touches of heavenly beauty.
Every where is seen exactness; but it is the exactness of hesitation,
and not of knowledge--the line of doubt, and not of power: all the
promises for ripeness are there; but, as yet, all are immature. And
mature art is presented when all these rude scaffoldings are thrown
down--when the man steps out of the chrysalis a complete idea--both
Psyche and Eros--free-thoughted, free-tongued, and free-handed;--a
being whose soul moves through the heavens and the earth--now
choiring it with angels--and now enthroning it, bay-crowned, among
the men-kings;--whose hand passes over all earth, spreading forth its
beauties unerring as the seasons--stretches through cloudland,
revealing its delectable glories, or, eagle-like, soars right up
against the sun;--or seaward goes seizing the cresting foam as it
leaps--the ships and their crews as they wallow in the watery
valleys, or climb their steeps, or hang over their flying
ridges:--daring and doing all whatsoever it shall dare to do, with
boundless fruitfulness of idea, and power, and line; that is mature
art--art of the time of Phidias, of Raffaelle, and of Shakspere. And,
Christian, in preferring the art of the period previous to Raffaelle
to the art of his time, you set up the worse for the better, elevate
youth above manhood, and tell us that the half-formed and unripe
berry is wholesomer than the perfect and ripened fruit.

_Christian._ Kosmon, your thoughts seduce you; or rather, your nature
prefers the full and rich to the exact and simple: you do not go deep
enough--do not penetrate beneath the image's gilt overlay, and see
that it covers only worm-devoured wood. Your very comparison tells
against you. What you call ripeness, others, with as much truth, may
call over-ripeness, nay, even rottenness; when all the juices are
drunk with their lusciousness, sick with over-sweetness. And the art
which you call youthful and immature--may be, most likely is, mature
and wholesome in the same degree that it is tasteful, a perfect round
of beautiful, pure, and good. You call youth immature; but in what
does it come short of manhood. Has it not all that man can
have,--free, happy, noble, and spir