tract attention-who are scarcely inferior to those of whom we have already spoken. Mr. T. Addison Richards (born in London, 1820) is a landscape and ideal painter, whose works have received popular applause for many years. A. Wordsworth Thompson is a prolific though still young artist, who paints American subjects in a French manner. He is a careful student, and his drawing is especially good. David Neal (born in Lowell, Mass., 1837) has resided in Munich for many years. His First Meeting of Mary Stuart and Rizzio has been extensively photographed. Mr. Neal is a pupil of Piloty, and, at his master's suggestion, has confined himself chiefly to figure and historical painting. It is, by the way, a striking fault of many of our American artists that, in their anxiety to appear versatile, they have done too many things to do one well. Prof. Niemeyer of the Yale Art School has painted some good genre pictures. Winslow Homer is a brightly humorous delineator of American character. His book and magazine illustrations are familiar to all. Mr. Homer is one of the most positively original of all our painters. A. H. Wyant is a landscape painter, and has few equals in depicting wild and rugged scenery. Walter Satterlee has, perhaps, done his best work in watercolors, but uses the oils with no mean ability. Mr. E. A. Abbey, whose delightful illustrations to Herrick's poems have been seen by most of our readers, is a rising artist. Mr. W. Gibson, Mr. Howard Pyle, Mr. C. S. Reinhart, Charles Graham, Henry A. Ogden, W. P. Snyder, and W. A. Rogers, are also among the best of our illustrators, and have exhibited excellent paintings. Ernest Longfellow, son of the poet, has painted, many beautiful illustrations of his father's poems and a remarkably fine portrait.

Other names crowd upon the memory, like those of Alfred Fredericks, Frost Johnson, Edward Moran, A. F. Tait, Eugene Benson, Louis C. Tiffany, Samuel Colman, F. B. Carpenter (engravings of whose President Lincoln Signing the Emancipation Proclamation are to be found in thousands of homes), Harry Fenn, Walter Shirlaw, Henry Bacon, J. W. Casilear, F. S. Church, T. R. Davis, Henry Leland, Thomas Le Clear, E. Wood Perry, Frederick Dielman, William Morgan, A. F. Bellows, C. H. Eaton, W. A. Coffin, Benoni L. Irwin, J. H. Dolph, James D. Smillie, George H. Smillie, Frederick Schuchardt, Jr., F. K. M. Rehn, M. De Forest Bolmer, Peter Moran, Bruce Crane, Frank T. Lent, A. A. Anderson, V. Tojetti, Edwin H. Blashfield, Thomas Hovenden, and a score of others who have attained distinction in the history of American Art.

As one glances over the field of which we have made a rapid survey, it is clear that our countrythough there is still much to be done in the way of clearing away old prejudices-has not a little to be proud of in what has already been accomplished. While it is absurd to institute comparisons between American Art and the schools of the older countries, there is every reason to feel encouraged and hopeful for the future. Year by year our painters are doing better work, and year by year the public is learning to appreciate that work at its true value, and to take an earnest interest in encouraging real merit. If the first hundred years of our national existence have, with so sterile a field and in the face of so many discouragements, produced so many men of recognized genius and so many noble works of art, what may we not expect from the hundred years before us?

OLERIDGE claims that Poetry is the blossom and fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotion, language. "Poetry," says Leigh Hunt, "is the breath of beauty flowing around the spiritual world as the winds that wake up the flowers do about the material." "The world is full of poetry; the air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies. It is the light that never was on land or seathe music of the soul." Swinburne declares that there are few delights in any life so high and rare as the subtle and strong delight of sovereign Art and Poetry.

"All men," says Emerson, "are poets at heart." No small portion of the exquisite pleasure we derive from the works of the poets arises from recognizing there in clear expression what we had obscurely felt in the most secret shrines of our being, and had thought peculiar to ourselves. What all dumbly feel, the poet feels so powerfully as to compel an utterance in the "golden cadence of poesy." "Most wretched men are cradled into poetry by wrong; they learn in suffering what they teach in song."

Poets are persons of more affluent and susceptible natures than other men, and symbolizing their experience in the choicest words, they reveal man to himself. Their mission is to give relief and pleasure to the soul by a fit expression of what stirs, burns, and crowds within; to reveal to duller eyes and colder hearts the beauty of nature-the wonder and bloom of the world. The poet is eminently an emancipator of men. One of his functions is to thrill imprisoned souls with the joyous notes of liberty, to open their cages of care, and to set them free. By his power of reproducing all things in contemplative and emotional imagination, he takes us out of mere self, and makes us live the whole life of humanity.

Poetry, in addition, is intrusted with a general apostleship of virtue and philanthropy, charged to portray the commanding charms of justice, faith, love, and magnanimity. The poet by his very temperament and gifts, is a believer, a lover, an enjoyer. He is too highly endowed with the blessed prerogatives of insight and fruition to be a victim of the petty distrusts, envies, hatreds, moroseness which afflict the souls of so many, imbittering their cup of experience from its foam to its dregs. Consequently his singing tends to cheer and sweeten all existence, flinging light and music abroad, beautifully reflecting everywhere in the mirror of his thoughts and sentiments whatever things are really fair, good, blissful, everlasting. "Poetry," says

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Shelley, "turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change; it subdues to union, under its light yoke, all irreconcilable things."

Another, and a central feature in the mission of Poetry is consolation. Sad and tender verses may often make us weep; but the tears we then shed are not smitten forth by cruel shocks, nor wrung out in scalding bitterness. The last and crowning use of Poetry is to impart inspiration to an often burdened existence, and to serve as the bright and blissful complement to a sometimes dark and defective world. Entering the enchanted realm and the divine fellowship of the poets we leave behind us repulsive difficulties, aching disappointment, and despair.

I see how plenty surfeits oft,

And hasty climbers soonest fall;

I see that such as sit aloft

Mishap doth threaten most of all:
These ge: with toil and keep with fear;
Such cares my mind could never bear.

Some have too much, yet still they crave;
I little have, yet seek no more;
They are but poor, though much they have,
And I am rich with little store.

They poor, I rich; they beg, I give;
They lack, I lend; they pine, I live.

I laugh not at another's loss,

I grudge not at another's gain :

No worldly wave my mind can toss,
I brook that is another's bane:

I fear no foe, nor fawn on friend;

I loathe not life, nor dread mine end.

I wish but what I have at will,
I wander not to seek for more,

I like the plain, I climb no hill,
In greatest storms I sit on shore,
And laugh at them that toil in vain,
To get what must be lost again.
My wealth is health and perfect ease,

My conscience clear my chief defense; I never seek by bribes to please,

Nor by desert to give offense; Thus do I live, thus will I die, Would all did so as well as I.

THE SEVEN AGES. ALL the world's a stage,

WILLIAM BYRD.

And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;
And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel,
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation

shifts

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice
In fair round belly, with good capon lined,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
age
And so he plays his part. The sixth
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side,
His youthful hose well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
SHAKSPEARE: As You Like It.

BEGONE DULL CARE! BEGONE dull care!

I prithee begone from me; Begone dull care!

Thou and I can never agree.

Long while thou hast been tarrying here,
And fain thou wouldst me kill;
But i'faith, dull care,

Thou never shalt have thy will.