think,--by which he lives his daily life; let him trace any one manufacture through all its successive ingenuities to its great uses and its great results. Let him travel a few hundred miles on a railroad, and note how all is ordered, with what precision all arrangements are made and conducted, and what a world it is in itself, moving through space like a world, and set in motion and stayed by the hand of one of his own Saxon blood; and then, in idea, transferring himself from his own work, and his pride of his own art, let him ask himself if he sees not something beyond, quite extraneous to himself, a great thing effected, which he never could have conceived nor have executed; and then let him say if there be not even in this our working world, a great and living poetry, a magnificent thought realised, a principle brought out, worthy an age; and then let him be content for a while that his own particular capacity should for a time be in abeyance, to great purposes inoperative, unproductive of the world's esteem. It may be that he will but have to wait for his season. His time may come again. Some new principle in the world's action, with possibly a secret and electric power, may reach him, enter his own mind, and set at large all his capacities, and make them felt; for that principle, whatever it is to be, will be electric, too, in the general mind. It may arise naturally out of the present state of things. Now, our schoolless art, like what has once been a mighty river, with all its tributary streams, has wandered into strange and lower lands, and been enticed away through innumerable small channels, still fertilising, in a more homely and modest way, many countries, but losing its own distinctive character and name. The streams will never flow back and unite again, but some of them, in this earth's shifts and changes, may again become rivers, and bear a rich merchandise into the large ocean, and so enrich the world. If we think upon the distinct characteristics of schools, we must be struck with this, that before each one was known, established, and confirmed in public opinion, it could not have been generally imagined and preconceived. It is altogether the creation of gifted genius. We acknowledge the setting up a great truth, of which we had not a glimpse until we see it worked out, and standing before us manifest. It is ours by natural adoption, not by a universal instinctive invention. So that it is a presumption of our weakness to believe, as some do, that the arena of art is limited, and every part occupied; and that, for the future, nothing is left but a kind of copying and imitation. Who is to set limit to the powers of mind? We can imagine a dogmatist of this low kind, before Shakspeare's day, in admiration of the Greek drama, laying down the laws of the unities as irrefragable, and that the great volume of the drama was closed with them. And some such opinions have been set forth by our Gallic neighbours, and