rival, in
lustre and beauty, the attractions of diamonds, goldsmiths' work, and
flowers. The admirable construction of machinery shares in the
enthusiasm excited by the beautiful fabrics woven by their tireless
fingers; and the "Golden Marriage" of use and beauty is every where
celebrated under varying forms.

They who imagine that art has died out of the world, and sigh for the
chisel of Praxiteles, the pencil of Apelles, and the glorious
conceptions of the masters of the middles ages, would do well to visit
the Crystal Palace, and contrast the rudeness which shaped all the
elements of ordinary life in former periods, with the elegance and
beauty which the simplest objects of common use are beginning to assume.
Not, however, that the one necessarily precludes the other, or that we
are fated to produce no more fine statues and paintings, no more
monumental temples and palaces, because we now have, at lower prices
than were paid in ancient times for inferior articles, beautiful
carpets, and fabrics of silk, wool, and cotton, furniture, porcelain,
and glass, in which the thought of the artist and the craft of the
artisan are so admirably blended that they seem to be identical. Art is
not dead; it is throwing out wider and deeper roots, and will bear
richer fruits in the garden of the future, enriched by the mingled
detritus of by-gone ages, than it has ever borne in the primitive
formations of the past.

One of the most interesting features of the present exhibition, the one
which constitutes its distinguishing character, is, undoubtedly, its
universality, and the interest which it excites among all nations, and
all classes. And it was time that the results of human activity in its
various departments, should thus be gathered together from the four
corners of the globe, for the world is cut up into so many small
fractions, and each fraction lives so much within the limits of its own
narrow circle, ignoring, for the most part, all that is going on outside
of it, that it is in the highest degree desirable that people should
begin to see something of what their neighbors are doing.

It is time that nations met elsewhere than on the field of battle, and
measured their strength and dignity by some more rational standard than
the relative force of their cannon; time also that the various classes
of society, so widely separated by the artificial divisions of caste and
fortune, should look, at length, into each other's face a