guided by a gigantic hand to inscribe a line in the history
of the human race. This circumstance gives a value to the Egyptian
hieroglyphics, to the Indian, Chinese and Mexican idols, however gross
and shapeless. They denote the height of the human soul in that hour,
and were not fantastic, but sprung from a necessity as deep as the
world. Shall I now add that the whole extant product of the plastic
arts has herein its highest value, as history; as a stroke drawn in
the portrait of that fate, perfect and beautiful, according to whose
ordinations all beings advance to their beatitude?

Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office of art to educate the
perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no
clear vision. It needs, by the exhibition of single traits, to assist
and lead the dormant taste. We carve and paint, or we behold what is
carved and painted, as students of the mystery of Form. The virtue of
art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing
variety. Until one thing comes out from the connection of things, there
can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought. Our happiness and
unhappiness are unproductive. The infant lies in a pleasing trance, but
his individual character and his practical power depend on his daily
progress in the separation of things, and dealing with one at a time.
Love and all the passions concentrate all existence around a single
form. It is the habit of certain minds to give an all-excluding fulness
to the object, the thought, the word, they alight upon, and to make
that for the time the deputy of the world. These are the artists, the
orators, the leaders of society. The power to detach and to magnify by
detaching is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator and
the poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary eminency of an
object,--so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in Carlyle,--the painter and
sculptor exhibit in color and in stone. The power depends on the depth
of the artist's insight of that object he contemplates. For every object
has its roots in central nature, and may of course be so exhibited to us
as to represent the world. Therefore each work of genius is the tyrant
of the hour And concentrates attention on itself. For the time, it is
the only thing worth naming to do that,--be it a sonnet, an opera, a
landscape, a statue, an oration, the plan of a temple, of a campaign, or
of a voyage of discovery. Presently we