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THE CRAYON.

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dreams of humanity and his earthly paradises, physiologywith his dreamy theories, .and a true knowledge of theworld and of men with Ins peculiar kind of knowledge ofhuman nature, will soon find how little of the scientificspirit there was in this man of imagination.

COLOR.

It seems to be very clear that the prevailing sentimentamong us, in regard to color, is an inadequate and a mistakensentiment. Its beauty, its richness, its glory, are not ap-preciated. The loveliness and power of its harmonies andcontrasts are felt by comparatively few. With some, in-deed, sensitiveness in regard to color seems to be a natural

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more common than to hear it spoken of as a subordinate beauty nay, even as the mere source of a sensual pleasure; and wemight almost believe that we were daily among men who

" Could strip, for aught the prospect yieldsTo them, ihe verdure from the fields ;And take the radiance from the cloudsWith which the sun his setting shrouds.* 1

But it is not so. Such expressions are used, for the most part,in thoughtlessness; and if the speakers would only take thepains to imagine what the world and their own existence would.become, if the blue were taken from the sky, and the gold fromthe sunshine, and the verdure from the leaves, and the crimsoafrom the blood, which is the life of man, the flush from th«cheek, the darkne.»s from the eye, the radiance from the hair if they could but see, for an insianr, white human creaturesliving in a white world, they Would soon feel what they owe tocolor. The fact is, that of all God's gifts to the sight of man ycolor is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. Wespeak rashly of gay color, and sad color, for color cannot atonce be good and guy. All good color is in some degree pen-sive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and mostthoughtful minds are those which love color the most.

Our next selection is from vol. iii. of the " Stones ofVenice," chap, iv., sec. xxxiv., p. 185 :

Only observe, in this matter, that a greater degree of realiza-tion is often allowed, for the sake of color, than would be rightwithout it. For there is not any distinction between the artisteof the inferior and of the nobler schools more definite than this that the first color for the sake of realisation, and the secondrealize for the sake of color. I hope that in the fifth chapter renough has been said to show the nobility of color, though itis a subject on which I would fain enlarge whenever I approaohit; fur there is none that needs more to be insisted on, chiefly

on account of the opposition of the persons who have no eyefor color, and who,, being therefore unable to understand thatit is just as divine and distinct in its power as music (only infi-nitely more varied in its harmonies), talk of it as if it wereinferior and servile with respect to the other powers of Art,*

Nothing is more wonderful to me than to hear the pleasure cf theeye in color, .spoken of with disdain as "sensual," while people exalt¦that of the car in music. Do they really suppose the eye is a lensnoble bodily organ than the ear that the organ by which nearly allour knowledge of the external universe is communicated to ns, andthrough which we learn to wonder and to love, can be less exalted inits own peculiar delight than the ear, which is only for the communi-

cation of the ideas which owe to the eye their very existence ? I donut mean to depreciate music. Let it be loved and reverenced as injust, cnly let the delight of the eye be reverenced more. The great

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whereas it is so far from being this, that wherever it enters, itmust take the mastery, and whatever else is sacrificed for itssake, it, at least, must be right. This is partly the case evenwith music. It is at our choice whether we will accompany apoem with music or not; but, if we do, the music must beright, and neither discordant nor inexpressive. The goodnessand sweetness of the poem cannot save it, if the music be harshor false; but, if the music be right, the poem may be insipid orinharmonious, and still saved by the cotes to which it iswedded.

But this is far more true of color. If that be wrong, all iswrong. No amount of expression or invention can redeem anill-colored picture; while, on the other hand, if the color beright, there is nothing it will not raise or redeem ; and there-fore, wherever color enters at all, anything may be sacrificedto it, and rather than it should be false or feeble, everything'must be sacrificed to it; so that when an artist touches color,it is the same thing as when a poet takes np a musical instru-ment; he implies, in so doing, that he is a master, up to a cer-

tain point, of that instrument, and can produce sweet soundfrom it, and is able to fit the course and measure of his wordsto its tones, which, if he be not able to do, he had better nothave touched it.

In like manner, to add color to a drawing is to undertake forthe perfection of a visible music, which, if it be fake, willutterly and assuredly mar the whole work; if true, propor-tionately elevate it, according to its power and sweetness.

But in no case ought the color to be added in order toincrease the realization. The drawing or engraving is all thatthe imagination needs. To "paint" the subject, merely to

make it more real, is only to insult the imaginative power, andt-> vn'garize the whole. Hence the common, though littleunderstood, feeling, among men of ordinary cultivation, that aninferior j-k.-tch is always better than a bad painting; althoughin the latter there may verily be more skill than in the former.For the painter who lias presumed to touch color without per-fectly understanding it not for the color's sake, nor because heloves it, but for the sake of completion merely has committedtwo sins against us he has dulled the imagination by nottrusting it far enough, and then, in this languid state, heoppresses it with false and base color ; for all color that is notlovely is discordant; there is no mediate condition. So, there-fore, when it is permitted to enter at all, it must be with the

.predetermination that, cost what it will, the color shall be rightand lovely; and I only wish that in general it were betterunderstood that v. painter's business is to paint, primarily; andthat all expression, and grouping, and conceiving, and what elsegoes to constitute design, are of less importance than color in acolored work. And so they were always considered in thenoble periods; and sometimes all resemblance to nature what-ever (as in painted windows, illuminated manuscripts, and suchother works) is sacrificed to the brilliancy of color; sometimesdistinctness of form to its richness, as by Titian, Turner, and

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ence, which owes at least the half of its beauty to the art ofinlaying, would furnish you with exquisite examples; its sculp-ture is, indeed, the most perfect which was ever produced bythe Gothic schools : but, besides this rich sculpture, all its flatsurfaces are inlaid with colored stones, being done with agreen serpentine, which forms the greater part of the coast ofGenoa. You have, I believe, large beds of this rock in Scot-land, and other stones besides, peculiarly Scottish, calculated toform as noble a school of color as ever existed. Piige 98.Lond. ed.

Read now the eloquent and "scriptural" appeal withwhich the lecture closes.

And how, then, will yon evade the conclusion, that theremust be joy, and comfort, and instruction in the literal heantyof architecture, when God descending in his utmost We to (he

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distressed Jerusalem, and addressing to her his most preciousand solemn promises, speaks to her in such words as these :" Oh, thou afflicted, tossed with tempest and not comforted.(What shall be dono to her? What brightest emblem of bless-ing will God set before her ?) " Behold, I will lay thy atoneswith fair colon, and thy foundations with sapphires ; and I willmake thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles, and allthy borders of pleasant stones." 0.

LOVE.'

We never supposed that in these days of railroads,steamboats, AtlaDtic telegraphs, sewing machines, stockgambling, and of every other instrument of trading craft,and money-making ingenuity, that a man over sixty yearsof age would deliberately sit down to write a book on theall but mythical subject of love. If this man were notM. Michelet, the historian, we should look upon the volume

before us as the ingenious and playful work of a mythogra-pher. An examination of the book itself, however, hassatisfied us that the author is the creature of his age, amere cork upon its drunken current; for, instead of writinga book upon love properly understood, he has written one onmarriage, and labelled it with the fascinating title of Love.In this respect he has the commercial tact of the times ofuever labelling a thing to be what it really is.

It is very dangerous, at any social period of the world,

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for an old man to pretend to write on love, except by wayof giving a reflected summary of his own past personal ex-periences. We seldom find the frosty face of Decembermade eloquent by the young blooming flowers of June, noran old mind willing or capable of suitably writing aboutthe sweet vagaries and primrose excursions of a young andsensitive heart. It is something pleasant enough to thinksilently upon the history of our own affections, whether itbe one of ruin or prosperity, but never to write and publishit to the world. Kindred spirits are too few and far be-tween in life to convert the sacred interior of our souls intoa public looking-glass, or to let the sacred fires of our ownaffections burst forth upon those whose icy natures aredoomed to eternal congealment.

If M. Michelet had the capacity to write a book onlove, he would have had the wise instinct of not publishingit in these days, for though the god of love is paintedblind, yet his sight becomes very good when he begins towrite. Our author is careful, however, to veil his ownlove-history, if he ever had any, and to study a selfish per-sonal reservation by talking about the many importantrevelations with which he has been favored by othersincluding even some of his medical friends. It is by this

literary juggle that he eludes all morbid curiosity as to hisown individual ease, and with the cunning skill of an adroitnovelist, gratifies the public with the secrets of othersrather than with his own. This would seem to be the trickof a man accustomed to serve up commercially literary nos-

* (.'Amour, by M: Michelet. Pari", 1859.

trums, in order to meet the vicious demand of a jaded, idleand gluttonous reading public. It is the curse of the day,that if a writer would be popular, or would have pay for

his labor, he must be ambidextrons, and hold out all thehollow allurements characteristic of the venders of qnack orpatent medicines. If M. Michelet had written an earnest,a spiritual, a poetically lofty treatise on love, as an honest,exalted, and humanizing impulse of onr natnre, we shbnldhave received it gratefully and reverentially as the maturedfruit of a mind beautifully green in its old age we shouldhave cordially commended it to the youth of onr. day fortheir perusal and meditation. But seeing this is not thecase, and that instead of a book on love he has given nsone on what may be called the physiology of marriage,popularly, sometimes mystically, written, we would rathersee it read by the fathers and mothers of our day than by

their sons and daughters. To the former, the work mightbe more instructive than injurious ; to the latter, it wouldbe infinitely more injurious than instructive. In sayingthis, we by no means accuse M. Michelet of an immoralpurpose, but rather of having erred through defect of judg-ment through vanity and a desire to say startling thingsin a phraseology full of affected pecnliarities.

The brain of M. Michelet would never seem to have beenthe nursery of much original or reliable thonght, and would

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never seem to have been able to give to the wanderingtheories of the day a local habitation and a name. In big?tory he has given to the thoughts of others not so much amextension as a new and taking dress. In his late works wehave many pearls, but no visible thread upon which to hangthem ; we have fine writing, but no serious or earnestthinking. His critics flounder in trying to pierce, toaccount for his strange, incoherent, and erratic utterances,and in seeking to flash light upon his darkness they become,blind themselves. In this book on love, we have curiouslyconfounded together the flashy style and dropsical thoughtsof the youth of seventeen, the sharpness of observation andthe shrewdness of reflection of the accomplished man of theworld, and the recondite results of much and varied scien-tific reading. His Anglo-Saxon critics are dumfounderedin the presence of this medley ; their automatic brainsswoon away before the brilliant coruscations of such &literary kaleidoscope. In this corybantic state of mindthey can only exclaim that the author is a Frenchman, andthat his work has been written for a French public, as ifhuman nature in France had some dark and inexplicableprotuberances by which we can account for everything,even the riddles Of the sphinx. The book of M. Michelet,however, is not less an enigma to English critics than the

melancholy case of their own Walter Savage Landor.When the latter shall emerge from the pillars of smokewhich liis literary countrymen have amassed aronnd him,we shall begin to hope for a better understanding ofM. Michelet in the region of the Thames.

In the human family, without reference to national orartifl-cial distinctions, we have very great diversities of mental or-

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