ed seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
When thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand formed thy dread feet?

What the hammer, what the chain,
Knit thy strength and forged thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dared thy deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

CHARLES BLANC

(1813-1882)

We have few personal details of Charles Blanc. We know that he lived in
a luminous world of form and thought, a life in harmony with his work;
we have books containing his conception of art; we know that art was his
one absorbing passion: and this should satisfy us, for it was his own
opinion that all which does not tend to illustrate an artist's
conception of art is of but secondary importance in his life.

Of Franco-Italian extraction, Charles Blanc was born in Castres, France,
on the 15th of November, 1813. When in 1830 he and his brother Louis,
youths of eighteen and nineteen, came to Paris, their aged father, an
ex-inspector of finance whose career had been ruined by the fall of
Napoleon, was dependent on them for support. Louis soon procured work on
a newspaper; but Charles, whose ambition from his earliest years was to
become a painter, spent his days in the Louvre, or wandering about Paris
looking in the old-print-shop windows, and he thus learned much that he
afterwards developed in his works. As his brother's position improved,
he was enabled to study drawing with Delaroche and engraving with
Calamatta. His masters gave him but little encouragement, however, and
he soon turned his thoughts to literature, his maiden effort being a
description of the Brussels Salon of 1836 for his brother's paper.

Exquisite sensitiveness and responsiveness to beauty eminently fitted
Charles Blanc for the position of art critic, and gave a charm to his
earliest writings. He brought to his new task the technical knowledge of
an artist, and a penetrating critical insight which, aided by study,
ripened rapidly. The evidence of talent afforded by his first art
criticism induced Louis Blanc to confide to him successively the
editorship of several provincial papers. But Charles's inclinations were
toward the calm atmosphere of art; he was, and ever remained,
indifferent to politics, and looked