Italian masters.

It accompanied the earliest immigrants to Canada, Florida and Louisiana. But all this was artificial, evangelical and brief, as well as foreign; and the occasional altar-pieces and portraits of the saints now found with the signatures of European masters, rather show the termination than the dawn of European art on this continent. There was indeed something of this sort here, anterior to the arrival of Columbus, or even of Biorn and Eric. The stone monuments of Copan and Palenque; the elaborate carvings of western Peru and Chili; the undeciphered relics of Lake Titicaca; the marvels of Guatemala and Nicaragua, and the occasional remnants of statuary, painting and pottery found in the tumuli of our own country, show how varied and extensive this native art culture was. The civilized form of art here, however, has no period beyond West's day, a century ago. Thence it can be traced down through Leslie and Washington Allston to the middle of this century, when apparently we are to note a novus ordo rerum. This date may be too late. It is not to be overlooked that C. W. Peale and John Trumbull and Copley and Stuart were anterior. Still it is to be borne in mind that West and Leslie and Copley lived principally abroad, and are Europeans in their art lives; and it is also to be considered that in the beginning the practical demands of a new country and the res angustæ domi were conjoined with the doctrines of Penn and the principles of the Puritans in hostility to art and art culture, while at the same time, fine examples of art, introduced by the settlers from every colony from Massachusetts to Mexico and Peru, stimulated native taste and directed original ability.

Omitting some unimportant essays, the first notable paintings in this country were executed by John Watson, from Scotland, in New Jersey; by John Smybert, of the same land, in Boston, and by one Williams, from England, in Philadelphia, in the first half of the last century. Theus, a portrait painter of South Carolina, classes with them, among the predecessors of Benjamin West. The latter, born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1732, received his first lessons in color from the Indians; visited Italy in 1753, by the aid of Governor Hamilton and Mr. Allan of Philadelphia; and not only surprised Cardinal Albani by his fair complexion, but won such British fame that he was able to refuse knighthood and yet gain a

grave in St. Paul's in 1820. He painted a "Christ Healing the Sick" for the Philadelphia Hospital, and a replica for the British Institute, and achieved an European reputation when Hogarth was dying. There is little vitality beneath his colors; but he had other merit than that of being the pioneer of American art, attested by his elevation to the presidency of the Royal Academy. J. S. Copley, the grandfather of Lord Lyndhurst, who died in London after much success in 1815; C. W. Peale, of Maryland, who died in 1827, after having founded the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Matthew Pratt, who studied with West in London, painted dukes and duchesses there and street signs after his return to this city in 1776, and service in the army; Gilbert Stuart, of Rhode Island, a philosopher in his calling, who studied with West, painted in Philadelphia and Washington, and died in Boston in 1828; John Trumbull, of Connecticut, another of West's pupils, who painted Adams and Jefferson and many notable Europeans between 1779 and 1789, Malbone, of Rhode Island, who died in Savannah in 1807, after having resided in London; Washington Allston, of South Carolina, whose "Dead Man Restored" was placed in the Philadelphia Academy in 1816, and whose many scriptural subjects adorn British galleries, glowing with Titian's colors; Henry Inman, who painted Chief-Justice Marshall and many others in Philadelphia about 1830, and Wordsworth, Macaulay, Chalmers, and their cotemporaries in England, and dying in 1846, left a rare reputation for versatility and power; Cole, whose "Course of Empire" and "Voyage of Life" were painted after study in Europe, and who died in 1848; R. Peale, whose portraits of Colonel Burd and of Washington are familiar, and whose sons preserved his name; C. W. Leslie, who copied Sir Thomas Lawrence's "West" for the Philadelphia Academy, and has left portraits of his friends Washington Irving, Cooke and Cooper, and many more, and whose cabinets are more highly prized every year; Sully and Jarvis, both of English birth, but distinguished by many excellent portraits and by some fine historical compositions, such as the "Passage of the Delaware;" Doughty, who transcribed the loveliness of scenery along the Susquehanna, and thoroughly understood the beautiful-these are among those whose works are inseparably connected with the beginning of

American art. They include names the world will not willingly let die. West, whose portraits of Byron, the Guiccioli and Lady Caroline Lamb are preserved in England; Allston, whose Elijah, Michael and Titania's Court have the same home; Chester Harding, whose portraits of the Dukes of Hamilton and Sussex are similarly disposed; Leslie, whose cabinets are in the same company; Inman, whose portraits are there praised; Pratt, whose dukes and duchesses preserve all that remain of some among them; Copley, of whom the remark may be repeated; Inman, Mignot, Kensett, Durand, Elliott, and others have certified their various capacities and given a foundation on which their countrymen may confidently build. It will be observed from the mention made that as the schools of the several artists varied, so did their styles and themes. If until recently, the general Government gave no encouragement to art, and the several States scarcely more, and small personal wealth restricted individual patronage, and there were few galleries and academies, the free political institutions of the country partly counterbalanced their make-weights and diffused education coöperated, and mental and business activity assisted in the endeavor to domesticate and develope a true national school. Thus Allston was inspired to breathe a true spiritual life into his ideals, and give intellectual power to his imagination. Thus Stuart was encouraged to look into and apprehend the philosophy and principles of art. Thus Leslie was directed to search for, find, and delineate those subtle qualities which caused Thackeray to describe him as "the good, the gentle, and the beloved." And thus their more favored successors have been helped forward in the same path, until the Earl of Ellesmere has placed examples of Church, Kensett and other cotemporary painters in the Bridgewater Gallery in London, when examples of West hang in the Royal Academy, and others of Pratt and Stuart and Trumbull and Malbone and Allston and Inman and Cole and Leslie and Harding, and later skill, are hung in the private as well as in the public galleries of the same country. And thus what was conceived in weakness and commenced without aid, has advanced until American art has emerged from the chrysalis, and is recognized in the architecture of the national Capitol, and in public and corporate and private buildings which blend grandeur with beauty and durability; in

many monuments, growing in number; in statuary which adorns our streets and halls and homes; and in paintings which, whether they represent the sea or the forest, mountain or meadow, his tory or the individual, or in whatever category they fall, not only have the promise of high excellence, but have that excellence, and show con stant progress. The early and wise study of European achievements, without which progress is unattainable, and of abstract principles, as requisite, has been continuous and increasing. More numerous and more excellent examples of all schools have been introduced, and adorn public and private galleries, and are accessible. Schools of Design and Academies of Fine Art have been founded in many principal cities, and provided with professors as well as with studies and capital. Excellent engravings and photographs have been rendered common. Literature has discharged its function well and abundantly, and increases that use annually. Industry, recognizing its past indebtedness and present and future dependence upon taste, has seconded the purely æsthetic motive, and trade has not neglected it.

From all these mixed motives and opportunities, American art has entered upon a new and more advanced stage. If it has produced no architect equal to those who erected St. Peter's and Westminster Abbey and the Cathedral of Strasbourg; none who excel or even rival the builders of many palaces, castles and halls abroad, and in Asia as well as Europe, it has marked its development in the magnificent Capitol and department buildings at Washington; in the fine public buildings at Albany, in New York City, and in Philadelphia; in colleges, and universities, and in private residences over all the country. Many of these vie with, and some surpass their foreign equivalents, and all blend beauty and fitness with occasion in a signal manner. They do not singly or collectively indicate a new order of architecture. They do foreshadow an eclecticism which, borrowing from all models and every source for its inspiration, must in time lead to a style based upon the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian; containing suggestions of the Moorish as well as of the Norman and Saxon, and adapted to the exigencies of our climate and the peculiarities of our political and social and industrial life. Already the better class of city residences here compare most favorably with their foreign correspondences. They

are of good material, stone or brick. They are well drained and lighted, and thoroughly ventilated; excellently partitioned; provided with large halls, fine stairways, conservatories, galleries and libraries. They are heated from one fire, and have water in every room. They realize the full idea of home, and beautify and improve it. And what has commenced with urban homes and edifices is annually spreading. That structure, intermediate between public and private edifices, the hotel, has attained an American type; and the American prison and public school and workshop are imitated abroad. Sculpture, less utilitarian and more difficult than its sister arts, has made slower progress with us. Powers and Greenough and Miss Hosmer have won distinction in it. The national capital is acquiring fine examples.

There are statues of Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Lincoln; and of great authors and divines, as well as of generals and statesmen, in several cities. The public buildings, parks and streets are taking on this great addition, and private taste is giving it hospitality. Still it is embryo, and a promise rather than a reality. Painting advances most rapidly and successfully and generally. The utmost patriotism will not maintain that even in this department our art has the equals of Meissonier, Gerome, Frere, Fromentin, Bouguereau, Couture, Cabanel, or Bonheur of France; or that it challenges equal consideration with Lawrence, Wilkie, Turner, Landseer, Eastlake, Stanfield and others who have in this century continued British renown. Nevertheless we can point to Powers, Gibson, Greenough, Story and Miss Hosmer in one department, and to Bierstadt, Colman, Eastman Johnson, Rossiter, and a very great number more of equal or approximate merit in the other, who have their claims vindicated by foreign as well as domestic judgment, and who are inciting and instructing their future superiors.

The century and a half in which American art has existed has not sufficed to produce that fruit which matures only in many centuries. It has developed it more rapidly than it was ever grown elsewhere; has outgrown original crudities of conception; remedied ignorance of principle, and having awakened an intelligent æsthetic conception in every State, is now advancing under more thorough appreciation and more generous patronage toward an ideal never wholly reached. The

finest performances thus far have been in the domain of landscape, and that for obvious reasons. Portraiture has not been neglected, and the marines and still-lifes from some American easels have earned their commendation. We are now at the threshold of historical and imaginative art. Aboriginal life is sufficiently remote to be colored with romantic hues. The war of Independence and the second war with England are no longer matters of personal memory. Even the Mexican war is growing dim, and we turn backward to the great war of the Rebellion. Each of these has a thousand themes for art, and every theme will in time be treated. Industrial art is being developed under the same potent cause; operating here as vehemently as anywhere. It has imported the art of China and Japan and India for direction and suggestion. It has given express use and value to views of the Yosemite and Niagara, the great lakes and the great rivers, and it employs every transcript of American forests in the fall. It is being nationalized by these adjuvants; and as the industrial object reaches new markets over all the world, where a conceded superiority of decoration runs with superior material, principle and fabrication, we may well forecast the day when our industrial art will parallel the industrial skill it illustrates, and become a help to the growth of high and all art. We may now indeed consider the hope of more than a century within our grasp. Just as we have affirmed the permanence of our political institutions to our own and the world's satisfaction, and made the Republic a future and continuing as well as a present certainty; just as we have attained a distinctively American literature, and illustrated it with such names as Irving, Bancroft, Edwards, Longfellow, Motley, Hildreth, Carey, and those of their compeers; just as we have laid hold of the useful arts and impressed them with the achievements of Franklin, Whitney, Morse and their successors; just as we have overcome the great detriment of our country and destroyed slavery with rebellion and installed upon their ruins the beginnings of a new political and a lustier industrial being-just so we are beginning to add ornament to use, to embellish peace and prosperity, to illustrate welfare and hope, and enter upon that stage of national being which shone under Pericles in Greece, was Augustan in Rome and Elizabethan in England. This beginning has been reached by the evolution and progress noted.

Its development is sure, but the rapidity of its rate is contingent upon wise aid and hearty encouragement. The schools and institutes and academies, whether of fine or industrial art, need larger endowments. The public taste needs more exact education, and art in the abstract a fuller recogni. tion. With fifty years of this tuition and use— with half of that-it is not a possibility, but a certainty, that the great advance the Western world has made in a century in government, in general education, and in industry, will be paralleled in that department which is as much their ornament and finish as it is their accessory, and which is the topmost flower, the very fruit, of human progress. Toward that we tend with accelerating speed

and growing concern. Interest, industry, taste and patriotism press an advance from which each gains, and by which all life, in hall or cottage, is embellished. Philosophy, recognizing this junc tion of grace with virtue-Tov kakov k’ayalov—which underran the Socratic system, now makes the asthetic a twin to the practical. We have but to hold our course and increase our speed in order to close this century with a harmonious progress that is continent of more and greater services than the thoughtless recognize. Something of the exact condition of art and the arts here now, and of their tendencies and possibilities and uses must be reserved to another number.

BEYOND the surging of the ocean stream,
Out of the reach of shifting winds it lies:
There never comes the sun with cheering beam,
No starlight glitters in those murky skies.
An everlasting twilight harbors there;
Upon the dormant soil broods drowsy air;
No lightnings flash, no thunders rise and cease,
Nor hear they moaning of the sea's abyss
There, where the tumult of no tempest is,
Beyond the bounds of human war and peace.

One only radiance knows that lonely land,
As on a winter's night, when every blast
Has sunk to silence, and with icy band

The rivers in their courses are held fast,
Over the dark pine forest bowed with snow
Rises a sudden and unearthly glow.
In silver tapering points and shining bars,
Far to the north the fitful frost-fire burns
And quivers, fades and flares aloft by turns
From the cold earth to the immortal stars.

So, when with us Apollo.highest drives

His chariot, in the long, bright summer days,
While Night against his power vainly strives.

The pale Cimmerians see a gleaming horse
Shine from the distant world of happy men
Over the rim of their dark land; and then
They say, "The gods have gathered to the feast,
Let us go thither;" but the vision fades

Ere their weak feet can bear them from the shades
Which never yet a victim have released.

Yet there dwells Life, though faint and soon to fade,
And though all men walk in the shadow there,
With trembling steps, and faces fear-dismayed,
Still do they breathe the vital upper air.
Though it be dark, there home is real and true;
Not like that under-world of livid hue
Where sits Aidoneus on phantom throne,
Where airy images renew their days,
Seeming to act again in earthly ways.
And Pain and Pleasure are alike unknown.

Down the steep cleft on mountain side, Distil the sweets of morning shower, And there the sparkling dew-drops slide To bless the valley's meekest flower.

So down the heights of human pride God's richest gift, the dews of grace, To humblest heart will softly glide And fit it for exalted place.

CHAPTER I.-THE RECLUSE.

In the year seventeen hundred and twenty-five there stood upon the northern bank, and near to the mouth of a small creek which, singularly enough, is called Jack's Bay, and which flows into the Patuxent River on its eastern side, a rude hut of logs. This hut contained two rooms upon its ground floor, and one large apartment above these, which occupied all the space immediately under the roof of rough clapboards. At each gable end of the hut was a chimney, built, like the hut itself, of logs, but protected on the inside against the effects of fire by a thick layer of clay. One of the two chambers down stairs had a window which looked towards the forest, that crowded upon the house on its northern side, and a door which opened towards the creek. The other down-stairs room had one window which also faced the forest, but no outer door. The up-stairs apartment, which was reached by a ladder from the outer of the two rooms below, had one very small window in its eastern gable near the chimney. Indeed, all the windows in the house were small, for glass was in those days a very expensive article everywhere, and, of course, especially so in the colonies.

A small cleared lot of ground, covering the space of about twenty yards between the hut and the shore, and extending towards the east some thirty yards, was cultivated as a kitchen garden. On every side of the humble building, except its southern side, where the creek spread its bright and transparent waters, extended the dark pine forest.

The only occupants of this rude dwelling were an aged man and a boy of some twelve or fourteen summers, both of whom were queer and unusual in dress, appearance and manners. The former, whenever he was seen in public, which was seldom, wore a broad slouched hat, a long coat with side pockets which reached to below the knees, a waistcoat that came to the hips, ankle breeches and a pair of low and broad fair-topped boots. All of his dress, except hat and boots, was of

was

broadcloth, and everything that he wore black. His hair and beard were long and gray. His eyes were dark and piercing, and his teeth very white and even for one of his apparent age. The whole cast of his features indicated a powerful and penetrative intellect and a resolute will. His head was large and well-shaped, too large in proportion to his body, which was rather low and rather slender also, but well-formed for both activity and strength. His height was less than five and a half feet.

The boy had black eyes expressive of vivacity and a fondness for fun, a dark and ruddy complexion and a redundancy of long and reddishbrown hair. His features were regular, and rather petite. He was quite small for his age, not being larger than an ordinary boy of nine or ten years. Every feature in his face and every gesture of his body expressed unusual intellect. His usual dress, whenever he appeared among the people in the neighborhood, was fashioned generally like the man's, and was of like materials and color.

The character and occupation of these dwellers in the hut were subjects of mystery and speculation to the residents in its neighborhood. Nothing was known of their origin, their business, or the object or objects which had caused them some two years before to take up their abode in such an out-of-the-way place. But strange conjectures were afloat, and such as were for the most part not at all to the credit of the residents of the cabin. Those who passed near the place on the creek or river at night--for none ventured to approach it by land at such an hour-heard weird sounds and saw strange lights there. The sounds were sometimes clear and ringing, sometimes low and moaning, always sweet. The lights shone from the window of the east room which faced the water; they were of different colors at different times, and sometimes beamed steadily, sometimes flashed out suddenly and as suddenly disappeared.

In truth, such sounds and appearances issuing from any dwelling were well calculated at that period of time to create a bad character for its