Especially Happy Is This Museum In Its Van Dycks.

Besides those incomparable portraits of Lady Oxford, of Liberti the Organist of Antwerp, and others better than the best of any other man, there are a few large and elaborate compositions such as I have never seen elsewhere.

The principal one is the Capture of Christ by Night in the Garden of Gethsemane, which has all the strength of Rubens, with a more refined study of attitudes and a greater delicacy of tone and touch. Another is the Crowning with Thorns, - although of less dimensions, of profound significance in expression, and a flowing and marrowy softness of execution. You cannot survey the work of Van Dyck in this collection, so full of deep suggestion, showing an intellect so vivid and so refined, a mastery of processes so thorough and so intelligent, without the old wonder of what he would have done in that ripe age when Titian and Murillo and Shakespeare wrought their best and fullest, and the old regret for the dead, - as Edgar Poe sings, the doubly dead in that they died so young. We are tempted to lift the veil that hides the unknown, at least with the furtive hand of conjecture; to imagine a field of unquenched activity where the early dead, free from the clogs and trammels of the lower world, may follow out the impulses of their diviner nature, - where Andrea has no wife, and Raphael and Van Dyck no disease, - where Keats and Shelley have all eternity for their lofty rhyme, - where Ellsworth and Koerner and the Lowell boys can turn their alert and athletic intelligence to something better than war.

A CASTLE IN THE AIR

I have sometimes thought that a symptom of the decay of true kinghood in modern times is the love of monarchs for solitude. In the early days when monarchy was a real power to answer a real want, the king had no need to hide himself. He was the strongest, the most knowing, the most cunning. He moved among men their acknowledged chief. He guided and controlled them. He never lost his dignity by daily use. He could steal a horse like Diomede, he could mend his own breeches like Dagobert, and never tarnish the lustre of the crown by it. But in later times the throne has become an anachronism. The wearer of a crown has done nothing to gain it but give himself the trouble to be born. He has no claim to the reverence or respect of men. Yet he insists upon it, and receives some show of it. His life is mainly passed in keeping up this battle for a lost dignity and worship. He is given up to shams and ceremonies.

To a life like this there is something embarrassing in the movement and activity of a great city. The king cannot join in it without a loss of prestige. Being outside of it, he is vexed and humiliated by it. The empty forms become nauseous in the midst of this honest and wholesome reality of out-of-doors.

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