But the want of extended sympathy with mankind, the artist
egotism, which looks inwardly for all material, and in truth scorns the
approval of the masses, must naturally fail to secure the interest of a
large class of readers. His compositions, on the contrary, which give
full scope to his keen, subtle powers of analysis, and vigorous handling
of the subject in question, are more widely understood and appreciated.
Since the days when Poe dealt with contemporaneous literature, and
literary men, in not the most temperate mood of criticism, poetic fire
in America, with few exceptions, seems to have sunk into a dead,
smouldering condition, and to have yielded to its sister art of painting
the task of grappling with the New-World monster of utilitarianism and
practical reform. The demands for indigenous painters in America being
constantly greater, the result is necessarily a vast increase and
improvement in this branch of Art.

New England, on whose barren musical soil we have already descanted, and
who has not hitherto disputed to the Old World her privilege of pouring
out on our untutored continent the accumulated wealth of years of
musical study and training, has at last gone far to redeem her
reputation of artistic nullity, by producing the greatest landscape
painter of which the country can boast. With us, the superiority of
atmospheric effects over most countries, and the great variety and
originality of American scenery, have united in bringing the landscape
painter into existence, and the public have assured this existence by
fostering applause and pecuniary compensation. Nature, thus prodigal of
gifts to America, has, in a crowning act of munificence, conferred also
a painter, capable of interpreting her own most recondite mysteries, and
of faithfully transcribing the beauties revealed to all eyes in their
simple majesty.

Immensity of theme possesses no terrors for Mr. Church's essentially
American genius; his facile brush recoils not before the gigantic
natural elements of his own land, but deals as readily and composedly
with the unapproachable sublimity of Niagara and the terrible beauty of
icebergs as with the peace of simple woodland scenes and the glowing
sentiment of the tropics. To tread the beaten path of landscape
painting, and offer to the public a tame transcript of the glories he
has beheld, is repugnant to the creative power of this true artist; but
when form, color, and the legitimate means at his