d, with a new
gallery of paintings for every square mile of land and sea, and new
dissolving views for every hour--she, with all these artistic
antecedents, tastes, and faculties, comes modestly into the
conservatory of the floriculturist, and takes lessons of him in
shaping and tinting plants and flowers which the Great Master said
were "all very good" on the sixth-day morning of the creation! This
is marvellous, showing a prerogative in human genius almost divine,
and worthy of reverent and grateful admiration. How wide-reaching
and multigerent is this prerogative! In how many spheres of action
it works simultaneously in these latter days! See how it
manipulates the brute forces of Nature! See how it saddles the
winds, and bridles and spurs the lightning! See how it harnesses
steam to the plough, the flood to the spindle, the quick cross
currents of electricity to the newsman's phaeton! Then ascend to
higher reaches of its faculty. In the hands of a Bakewell or Webb,
it gives a new and creative shaping to multitudinous generations of
animal life. Nature yields to its suggestion and leading, and co-
works, with all her best and busiest activities, to realise the
human ideal; to put muscle there, to straighten that vertebra, to
parallel more perfectly those dorsal and ventral lines, to lengthen
or shorten those bones; to flesh the leg only to such a joint, and
wool or unwool it below; to horn or unhorn the head, to blacken or
blanch the face, to put on the whole body a new dress and make it
and its remote posterity wear this new form and costume for
evermore. All this shows how kindly and how proudly Nature takes
Art into partnership with her, in these new structures of beauty and
perfection; both teaching and taught, and wooing man to work with
her, and walk with her, and talk with her within the domain of
creative energies; to make the cattle and sheep of ten thousand
hills and valleys thank the Lord, out of the grateful speech of
their large, lustrous eyes, for better forms and features, and
faculties of comfort than their early predecessors were born to.

Equally wonderful, perhaps more beautiful, is the joint work of
Nature and Art on the sweet life and glory of flowers. However many
they were, and what they were, that breathed upon the first Spring
or Summer day of time, each was a half-sealed gift of God to man, to
be opened by his hand when his mind should open to a new sense of
beauty and perfectio