bulrush, the papyrus, and the palm. The Greeks adopted their own acanthus and honeysuckle. The Gothic workers selected the oak, ivy, fern, and even the common dock and parsley. It has been well argued that all debasement of art, and all enervation of character in connection with the fine arts, have been through want of sympathy with and adherence to Nature. Certainly both man and his work must be invigorated and ennobled by communion with Nature, and by reproduction of her truths, her freshness, and her loveliness. In this way- this one of the "Two Paths ornament would never become "but the gilded shore To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word, The seeming truth which cunning times put on Every child, every youth, should learn to draw directly from nature, beginning, it may be, with a turnip, seldom copying pictures, never copying them if they are not by the great masters of pictorial truth. The visible results of right practice might be little, and worth little; fond parents might not be able to point visitors to monstrosities framed in gold, and very admirable in the obsolete sense of the word; but the invisible results of earnest pursuit of the right method would be sublime, new eyes received, a vast, new world of nature and art revealed, and pure healthfulness of taste and soul inspired. Ruskin's "Elements of Drawing" goes far to supply the needed guide, but unfortunately refers the student to many things beyond his reach, if not beyond his pecuniary ability also; and the study of the human figure, recommended by this author as indispensable to excellence and purity in all art, ornamental or more technically fine, requires other manuals. In every institution of learning, the arts of design, especially of decoration, should be taught, both theoretically and practically. Many persons might find pecuniary profit in design; many are themselves destined to be artisans; many more would have some direct influence on mechanics and manufacturers; all would be disciplined, would be educated in that most fundamental of all respects, the knowledge of things in distinction from other men's thoughts about things; and all would help to create a right supply in the market, by becoming discreet purchasers, and would aid in many ways the development of that feeling for art which is half the prosperity of any nation. We have mostly adhered to the common and narrow acceptation of the word ornament in stating the above principles. Of course it would be impossible within the limits of this article to attempt a statement of the more frequently discussed principles of those high arts which, as we have seen, are ornamental in their original idea and application. There is ample need of a wider and profounder attention to this whole subject than has ever yet been given; great need of a systematic, popular, and exhaustive treatise. Other errors may often be impenetrable, but bad taste is easily shamed out of countenance by holding up to it the mirror of nature. If we were to sum up the greatest and most common violations of the principles of beauty in this land, we should mention cheap extravagance, cheap falsehood, baldness, squareness, and imitative monotony, relieved only by occasional foolish novelty. We are cheap; we build, make, buy, for the hour, not for permanence. We are, nevertheless, often extravagant and barbarous in taste; gilding everything to excess, and thus depreciating the preciousness of golden effect; making small carpets with figures designed for the great halls of the Tuileries, glaring colors, and roses as large as cabbages; dresses with spread-eagle patterns; marble stores like palaces, even furnished with ebony inlaid with mock-gold. We are false; every door, wall, pail, grained or marbled, to the obliteration of the truer and more beautiful graining of nature; every ceiling stuccoed; the interior of churches covered with trickeries of form and color; and, until recently, all furniture veneered, whereas our native woods are abundantly varied and rich. We are most unnaturally bare and square; -the men cut and patterned into angles and straight lines, from the top of the hat to the toe of the boot; the women striped and plaided; crockery inclining to be angular; every house an exact cube or parallelopiped; windows alike and square, and set at regular intervals, not combined, or varied, or projected; the outer walls blank, with no hint of inner construction; the building and blinds raw in color; the village street forbidden to wind gracefully up and down, hither and thither, but ambitious to be city-like, and graded into eternal levels, and crossing at everlasting right-angles. We are fashionably monotonous and fickle; - all buildings copies of one another, without regard to owner and use, so that a man hardly knows whether he is entering his neighbor's house or his own, - if not copied full size, then in miniature, like a martin-cage; all furniture and dress aspiringly and drearily alike, if not costly, then cheaply imitative. When the style of anything changes, the entire nation hastens to follow, pellmell. The unsettled problems of the subject, such as the claims. of styles, their application to newly-used material, and the merits of hand-work as opposed to that of machinery, must be left untouched, with the single remark, that it seems unwise and useless to bemoan the present confusion of styles, instead of accepting it as either a step-stone or cap-stone to the cosmopolitan character the human race is rapidly assuming. Nor is it in our way now to follow the topic up into the impalpable region of language and music. The marrow and soul of ornament would be lost to us, however, if we were to overlook its sentiment and significance. By this is intended something more than the analogy between the finished graces of art and those of character; - the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, the cherished parental instruction worn as an ornament of grace unto the head and chains about the neck, the wisdom that is as rubies and jewels of fine gold, these are the realities of which material adornment is the shadow and figure. Nor do we refer to the truth that all ornament is language, and that many ideas and feelings may be conveyed by it, general and specific. The sentiment and meaning of it all, we think, may be summed up in one bright word,-joy,— the joy of life, of superabounding vitality, faculty, power, resource, divine and human, which not only work, but work with will and pleasure, rejoicing and playing over the work, not driven by stern necessity to a labor that looks only to bare necessity and barren utility. To all who have eyes to see, ornament in nature and art is a gospel, - glad tidings of mighty life and inexhaustible resource, in a word, of infinity, speaking forth in all the work of God and of man, and saying, "I can not only make, I can adorn, and all shall be to me but happy play, my work my joy," and straightway leaping and sparkling into ornament as the fulness of the sea breaks into crests of foam. In this there is perhaps an affirmation and revelation of the immortal superiority of the spiritual to the material, so that even a bit of embroidery or the streak of an apple may be an evangel of all that which Christianity teaches in common with natural religion, not omitting the priceless worth and equal rights of the individual man. Such would be a popular statement of the truth. But the ornamental enters into the very idea of life and of a universe, not alone into the idea of abounding life. Shall we look more deeply into the matter, at the risk of being misty or mystical? Life, in its simplest aspect, is defined by Guyot as "a mutual exchange of relations," and he finds it in "the lively actions and reactions, the perpetual play of the forces of matter," "its incessant and prodigious activity," no less than within the narrower limits of animal and vegetable organism. No thought has been to us so fruitful, none has led to so clear a perception of the essential unity of all great ideas, as well as the correspondence between all departments of being. Indeed, the thought seems to be wrapped up in the derivation of the very word universe. The definition applies to and explains all manner of life, intellectual, social, commercial, moral, Christian, no less than cosmical. But the point is, that life consists in exchange, in action and reaction. And it is evident to all observers that life and beauty most abound together. Where chemical life acts with greatest intensity in mineral elements, there the crystal is born and multiplied in its highest perfection. Where light and heat are most powerfully present, in connection with all vegetable constituents, there are luxuriance and bloom and wealth of color. Where all modes of life, spiritual and other, meet in man, there is the crown of natural forms; and most lovely when the overflowing vitality of childhood is yet unexpended. The reason is this: the beauty of a line or color depends on its purity, and purity is synonymous with energy, as Ruskin has shown. It is the presence of weakness, decay, death, that deform and discolor, or simply neutralize all glow and shapeli ness. The vigorous tree is perfect; the flowing stream — well called “living”—is pure and sparkling. This energy that purifies, perfects, beautifies, is life, for life is an interplay of energies. Life, then, of necessity evolves beauty; and its free, right interactions, without disorder or obstruction, are joy itself," the oil of joy" as it were, so smooth and pleasurable is the normal movement of all spiritual and physical machinery. Hence the great import of the words "eternal life," as expressive of blessedness, and the phrase "beauty of holiness," that is to say, the beauty of wholeness and health, for the three words have a common root. It is the beauty of a complete being that evolves pure, and therefore beautiful, moral colors and lines and lights, and even physical, by the force of its living and unswerving energies, the parts acting well together, and the whole in harmonious working with other beings and external objects. Moreover, since fancy and imagination are the powers most prominent in ornamentation, it is in ornament especially that we feel the presence of a free, spontaneous, and thus happy, activity or life; for imagination and fancy are the very faculties which, in our experience, work most easily, untiringly, involuntarily; these are the faculties that are awake in sleep, needing not the repose that other powers of the mind demand; the working of these we most often designate as play. Because the involuntary right action of all its powers, even of the "will" itself, expresses the soul's perfect state, therefore it is in the production of the beautiful- largely due to self-acting and tireless fancy—that we may best behold the ideas of joy, purity, energy, life. It is well called "creative" work, even when human; it is such in its divine happiness and pure vital power, as well as in reference to the results it originates. And here we might add, that there is indeed an evil energy, a false joy and beauty, in the realm of art as in that of morals; but it is disordered power, often more intense in its brief abnormal activity than is regulated power; and it is a wondrous confirmation of the foregoing remarks, that even then, as vital energy, it must produce at least a semblance of joy and beauty, -the joy of delirium and the beauty of death. Ornamental art smiles to us in every playful line and cheerful color; we have attempted to explain why. With the |