"Spirit's Flight," with the eyes of the mother resting on the symbol of the atonement, and a true child "full of graceful simplicity," fixes the gaze of tenderness and love. Then look at the "Indian Girl." She has found a crucifix, and holds it carefully and inquiringly in her right hand in her left, loosely held as if forgotten, are the feathers gathered for the adornment of native grace,- beautiful, touching, spiritual. There the "White Captive" seems ready to speak, while you are mute with sympathy and admiration. "The moment chosen by the sculptor is evidently that when the full consciousness of her awful fate is awakened, perhaps the morning after the capture, when, no longer fearing pursuit, the savages despoil their beautiful victim, and gloat over her anguish. She is no longer breathlessly hurried onward, but standing there in the wilderness, desolate and nude, realizes through every vein and nerve the horrors of her situation; but virgin purity and Christian faith assert themselves in her soul, and chasten the agony they cannot wholly subdue. Accordingly, while keen distress marks her expression, an inward comfort, an elevated faith, combines with and sublimates the fear and pain. Herein is the triumph of the artist. The White Captive' illustrates the power and inevitable victory of Christian civilization. Not in the face alone, but in every contour of the figure, in the expression of the feet as well as the lips, the same physical subjugation, and moral self-control, and self-concentration are apparent. The beauty and anguish walking hand in hand the downward road to death' are upraised, intensified, and hallowed by that inward power born of culture, and that elevated trust which comes from religious faith."*

These and many other works of exquisite art are only in part the outward manifestations of the inner life of thought and feeling of our fellow-citizen,— Mr. E. D. Palmer, too diffident to allow himself to be named, and yet so far almost unconsciously demonstrative as to add lustre to the future of American art.

* Tuckerman's American Artist, "Palmer."

Compelled as we are to pause here, we can only ask our readers to stand reverently before the great Creator of mind and genius, and adore the wisdom, the power and love, so richly blended in these splendid creations.

PHOTOGRAPHY.

This means the art of depicting objects by means of light. Priestley seems to have been the first to discover by chemical experiments that this was possible. The experiments of Schule, a Swedish philosopher, who shared with Priestley the honor of discovering oxygen gas, tended further to demonstrate this possibility. The names of Count Rumford, Mr. Wedgwood, and Sir Humphry Davy, are also mentioned as having made valuable contributions to discoveries in this field. Daguerre in France in 1839, and, about the same time, Talbot in England, invented methods "for the fixation of the images of the camera obscura;" and the results were deemed of great importance. The process came to be called the daguerrotype, in honor of the distinguished French discoverer; and the pictures of outward objects were exceedingly sharp and fine.

It is, however, to Dr. Draper of the New-York University that the world is indebted for the discovery that likenesses could be taken by light from the living presence. Dr. Draper announced his discovery in the London, Edinburgh, and Dublin philosophical magazines; and it is believed that he carried the art to so high a degree of perfection, that some of his portraits have not been excelled. "This great im-. provement was accomplished at a time when the inventor of the daguerrotype had given it up as impossible." *

From this point, experiments have advanced until photog raphy has become an immense business in the United States and elsewhere. The various forms of the art are so well known as hardly to need description. Ambrotype and pho

* Appleton's Cyclopædia, art. "Photography."

tograph portraits have nearly superseded the old daguerrotypes in popular use, but not in real artistic perfection.

The result of the whole is to give to people of the most ordinary means the luxury of likenesses painted by the sun, which preserve the features of friends living and dead. The discovery is, therefore, of great value. The miniature in oil was so costly, that only the few could afford it; hence photography is a very large accession to the happiness and improvement of the masses, as well as the wealthy and most highly cultivated.

It has come to be applied to depicting landscapes and copying manuscripts with great distinctness and beauty, and is a grand accession to the convenience and perfection of the portrait-painter and engraver. Large as is the field of this art, its applications are destined to be still farther extended. It undoubtedly deserves to rank high among the astonishing discoveries of our own eventful times.

Thus have we endeavored to present the development of learning and the arts in America, that our readers may see how high above mere human possibility the mind of the Great Republic has been raised by the direct power of God.

CHAPTER VIII.

DEVELOPMENT OF MANHOOD AND HUMANITY.

"The Americans are a very old and a very enlightened people, who have fallen upon a new and unbounded country, where they may extend themselves at pleasure, and which they may fertilize without difficulty. This state of things is without a parallel in the history of the world." - DE Tocqueville.

THERE is a higher, more important progress than the merely physical,- -a greatness that rises above the greatness of wealth and commerce, and quite as far above the merely intellectual.

If the effect of climate or the configuration of our continent had been to make us earthly and sensual, and, as a nation, we had become only large consumers and large traders, the period of development in our history had been only the animalization of the race with an enormous growth of individualism, which would have made us the contempt and scorn of all pure intelligences on earth and in heaven. The Western continent, it has been noticed, is concave toward the sky; while the Eastern is convex. Our rivers run from the outer rims toward the great inward trough, and so seek the sea by the way of the Mississippi; therefore, it has been very learnedly explained, our minds run downward, earthward, and we are material, naturally and necessarily materialists while the land of the Europeans and Asiatics arches towards the centre, and their waters are drained each way towards the oceans; therefore the Europeans and Asiatics by great physiological laws look up, and are inevitably religious, superstitious.

If this argument were not a most ridiculous conceit, and therefore utterly unworthy of serious consideration, and if the tendencies were exactly what this physical theory of the moral man assumes, we have a strong and triumphant answer in the facts; for, despite the convexity of the East and the concavity of the West, materialism and sensuality are rank and extended in both hemispheres. Even the present forms of religion are compelled to resist the downward tendency of fallen human nature, everywhere, by the most heroic exertions; an era of rationalistic scepticism and another of kindred ritualism not unfrequently following rapidly on the track of great religious reformations.

TRUE MANHOOD.

The great truth is, that, in the Orient as well as the Occident, men can be good and great only by aid from above. Under the action of this inspiration, selfishness and corruption, there as here, recede, and give place to all the ennobling feelings and acts of regenerated humanity. There and here, human pride and ambition substitute the material for the spiritual, the worship of the fine arts for the worship of the great Architect of the heavens and the earth, of church architecture instead of the Holy Being to whom these stately, magnificent edifices are consecrated. In America, just as much, and no more, must be conceded. Without the regeneration and the new life, we are earthly and sensual, exactly like Europeans; and tend to idolatry in some form, like the Asiatics: while, just like both, under the power of the great spiritual resurrection, despite the concavity of our part of the globe, our nations are refined and exalted; and we rise in the scale of greatness to the highest spirituality and benevolence. One grand announcement includes us all. "Ye must be born again" reveals at once the reasons for our despair and our hope.

In the new moral creation, we have a marked development