With All New England's Earnestness And Practical Efficiency, There Is A Long Withering Of The Soul's More Ethereal Part, - A Crushing Out Of The Beautiful, - Which Is Horrible.

Children are born there with a sense of beauty equally delicate with any in the world, in whom it dies a lingering death of smothered desire and pining, weary starvation.

I know, because I have felt it. - One in whom this sense has long been repressed, in coming into Paris, feels a rustling and a waking within him, as if the soul were trying to unfold her wings, long unused and mildewed. Instead of scorning, then, the lighthearted, _mobile_, beauty-loving French, would that we might exchange instructions with them - imparting our severer discipline in religious lore, accepting their thorough methods in art; and, teaching and taught, study together under the great Master of all.

I went with M. Belloc into the gallery of antique sculpture. How wonderful these old Greeks I What set them out on such a course, I wonder - anymore, for instance, than the Sandwich Islanders? This reminds me to tell you that in the Berlin Museum, which the King of Prussia is now finishing in high style, I saw what is said to be the most complete Egyptian collection in the world; a whole Egyptian temple, word for word - pillars, paintings, and all; numberless sarcophagi, and mummies _ad nauseam!_ They are no more fragrant than the eleven thousand virgins, these mummies! and my stomach revolts equally from the odor of sanctity and of science.

I saw there a mummy of a little baby; and though it was black as my shoe, and a disgusting, dry thing, nevertheless the little head was covered with fine, soft, auburn hair. Four thousand years ago, some mother thought the poor little thing a beauty. Also I saw mummies of cats, crocodiles, the ibis, and all the other religious _bijouterie_ of Egypt, with many cases of their domestic utensils, ornaments, &c.

The whole view impressed me with quite an idea of barbarism; much more so than the Assyrian collection. About the winged bulls there is a solemn and imposing grandeur; they have a mountainous and majestic nature. These Egyptian things give one an idea of inexpressible ungainliness. They had a clumsy, elephantine character of mind, these Egyptians. There was not wanting grace, but they seemed to pick it up accidentally; because among all possible forms some must be graceful. They had a kind of grand, mammoth civilization, gloomy and goblin. They seem to have floundered up out of Nile mud, like that old, slimy, pre-Adamite brood, the what's-their-name - _megalosaurus, ichthyosaurus, pterodactyle, iguanodon_, and other misshapen abominations, with now and then wreaths of lotus and water lilies round their tusks.

The human face, as represented in Assyrian sculptures, is a higher type of face than even the Greek: it is noble and princely; the Egyptian faces are broad, flat, and clumsy. If Egypt gave birth to Greece, with her beautiful arts, then truly this immense, clumsy roc's egg hatched a miraculous nest of loves and graces.

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