asured verse and rhyme. His material, or instrument, which serves
him in the stead of shifting and transitory language, is a pure, white,
undecaying substance. It insures immortality to whatever is wrought in
it, and therefore makes it a religious obligation to commit no idea
to its mighty guardianship, save such as may repay the marble for
its faithful care, its incorruptible fidelity, by warming it with an
ethereal life. Under this aspect, marble assumes a sacred character; and
no man should dare to touch it unless he feels within himself a certain
consecration and a priesthood, the only evidence of which, for the
public eye, will be the high treatment of heroic subjects, or the
delicate evolution of spiritual, through material beauty.

No ideas such as the foregoing--no misgivings suggested by them
probably, troubled the self-complacency of most of these clever
sculptors. Marble, in their view, had no such sanctity as we impute
to it. It was merely a sort of white limestone from Carrara, cut into
convenient blocks, and worth, in that state, about two or three dollars
per pound; and it was susceptible of being wrought into certain shapes
(by their own mechanical ingenuity, or that of artisans in their
employment) which would enable them to sell it again at a much higher
figure. Such men, on the strength of some small knack in handling clay,
which might have been fitly employed in making wax-work, are bold to
call themselves sculptors. How terrible should be the thought that the
nude woman whom the modern artist patches together, bit by bit, from a
dozen heterogeneous models, meaning nothing by her, shall last as long
as the Venus of the Capitol!--that his group of--no matter what, since
it has no moral or intellectual existence will not physically crumble
any sooner than the immortal agony of the Laocoon!

Yet we love the artists, in every kind; even these, whose merits we are
not quite able to appreciate. Sculptors, painters, crayon sketchers, or
whatever branch of aesthetics they adopted, were certainly pleasanter
people, as we saw them that evening, than the average whom we meet
in ordinary society. They were not wholly confined within the sordid
compass of practical life; they had a pursuit which, if followed
faithfully out, would lead them to the beautiful, and always had a
tendency thitherward, even if they lingered to gather up golden dross
by the wayside. Their actual business (though they talked about it very