she speaks out a sentence, full in its cadence, complete in its structure; it occupies, for the time, the sense and the thought. We have no care for promises. Will you say it is the superficialness of my life, that I have known hours with men and nature, that bore their proper fruit,—all present ate and were filled, and there were taken up of the fragments twelve baskets full? Is it because of the superficial rind, or the believing heart, that I can say this?’
‘Only through emotion do we know thee, Nature! We
lean upon thy breast, and feel its pulses vibrate to our
own. That is knowledge, for that is love. Thought
will never reach it.’
ART.
There are persons to whom a gallery is everywhere a home. In this country, the antique is known only by plaster casts, and by drawings. The Boston Athenæum, — on whose sunny roof and beautiful chambers may the benediction of centuries of students rest with mine! — added to its library, in 1823, a small, but excellent museum of the antique sculpture, in plaster; — the selection being dictated, it is said, by no less an adviser than Canova. The Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venuses, Diana, the head of the Phidian Jove, Bacchus, Antinous, the Torso Hercules, the Discobolus, the Gladiator Borghese, the Apollino, — all these, and more, the sumptuous gift of Augustus Thorndike. It is much that one man should have power to confer on so many, who never saw him, a benefit so pure and enduring.
To these were soon added a heroic line of antique
