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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
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