d like music through my brain;
Night interpreted to me
All its grace and mystery.

SOMETHING ABOUT PICTURES.

It is not surprising that pictures, with all their attraction for eye
and mind, are, to many honest and intelligent people, too much of a
riddle to be altogether pleasant. What with the oracular dicta of
self-constituted arbiters of taste, the discrepancies of popular writers
on Art, the jargon of connoisseurship, the vagaries of fashion, the
endless theories about color, style, chiaro 'scuro, composition, design,
imitation, nature, schools, etc., painting has become rather a subject
for the gratification of vanity and the exercise of pedantic dogmatism,
than a genuine source of enjoyment and culture, of sympathy and
satisfaction,--like music, literature, scenery, and other recognized
intellectual recreations. In these latter spheres it is not thought
presumptuous to assert and enjoy individual taste; the least independent
talkers will bravely advocate their favorite composer, describe the
landscape which has charmed or the book which has interested them; but
when a picture is the subject of discussion, few have the moral
courage to say what they think; there is a self-distrust of one's own
impressions and even convictions in regard to what is represented on
canvas, that never intervenes between thought and expression, where
ideas or sentiments are embodied in writing or in melody. Nor is this to
be ascribed wholly to the technicalities of pictorial art, in which so
few are deeply versed, but in a great measure to the incongruous and
irrelevant associations which have gradually overlaid and mystified a
subject in itself as open to the perception of a candid mind and healthy
senses as any other department of human knowledge. Half the want of
appreciation of pictures arises from ignorance, not of the principles
of Art, but of the elements of Nature. Good observers are rare. The
peasant's criticism upon Moreland's "Farm-yard"--that three pigs never
eat together without one foot at least in the trough--was a strict
inference from personal knowledge of the habits of the animal; so the
surgeon found a head of the Baptist untrue, because the skin was not
withdrawn somewhat from the line of decollation. These and similar
instances show that some knowledge of or interest in the thing
represented is essential to the appreciation of pictures. Sailors and
their wives crowded around Wilkie's "Chelsea Pensioners