e but
different forms of that one eternal language of which not even Babel
could confound the significance. There is hardly a single work in this
Exhibition which does not illustrate the close connection between
literature and art.

Landscape painting has always been the chief glory of our English
school, and what are the great poets of all ages but landscape painters,
and what are the best landscape painters but poets? Alike they reproduce
for us aspects of nature translated into human thoughts and tinged with
human emotion. When Homer shows us bees swarming out of the hollow rock
and hanging in grapelike clusters on the blossoms of spring; when
AEschylus flashes upon us the unnumbered laughter of the sea-waves; when
Virgil in a single line paints for us the silvery Galaesus flowing now
under dark boughs, and now through golden fields; when Dante bids us
gaze on a sky which is of the sweet color of the Eastern sapphire; when
Wordsworth points us to the daffodils tossing in the winds of March
beside the dancing waves of the lake; when Tennyson shows us "the gummy
chestnut buds that glisten in the April blue;" when even in prose Mr.
Ruskin produces scenes and sunsets as gorgeous as those of his own
Turner--what are they but landscape painters.

Again, how many memorable scenes of history are inseparable in our minds
alike, and almost equally, from the descriptions of the writer or the
conceptions of the artist? Shall we ever think of the execution of Mary
Queen of Scots without recalling Mr. Froude's description of her, as she
stood, a blood-red figure on the black-robed scaffold? Shall we ever
think of Monmouth pleading for his life with James II, without
remembering the picture which hung last year upon these walls? Is there
no affinity between novelist and our many painters of ordinary scenes,
with their kindred endeavor to shed light and beauty on the hopes and
fears, the duties and sorrows of human life? Nay, even if the preacher
and the divine may claim any part in the domain of letters, they, too,
look to the artist for the aid and inspiration which, in their turn,
they lend to him. Which of us can ever read the words, "These are the
wounds with which I was wounded in the house of my friends," or,
"Behold, I stand at the door and knock," without being helped to realize
their meaning by the pathetic allegories of Mr. Millais and Mr. Holman
Hunt? And if, sir, you will pardon the allusion, the verse, "Oh! had I
the