Questions like these have been asked also in times preceding ours. Alfred de Musset wrote upon this subject in 1833, in Paris: "There are people who tell you our age is preoccupied, that men no longer read anything or care for anything. Napoleon was occupied, I think, at Beresina: he, however, had his _Ossian_ with him. When did Thought lose the power of being able to leap into the saddle behind Action? When did man forget to rush like Tyrtaeus to the combat, a sword in one hand, the lyre in the other? Since the world still has a body, it has a soul." Monsieur Charles Blanc writes: "In order to have an idea of the importance of the arts, it is enough to fancy what the great nations of the world would be if the monuments they have erected to their faiths, and the works whereon they have left the mark of their genius, were suppressed from history. It is with people as with men--after death only the emanations of their mind remain; that is to say, literature and art, written poems, and poems inscribed on stone, in marble or in color." The same writer, in his admirable book, _Grammaire des arts du dessin,_ from which we are tempted to quote again and again, says: "The artist who limits himself simply to the imitation of Nature reaches only _individuality_: he is a slave. He who interprets Nature sees in her happy qualities; he evolves _character_ from her; he is master. The artist who idealizes her discovers in her or imprints upon her the image of _beauty_: this last is a great master.... Placed between Nature and the ideal, between what is and what must be, the artist has a vast career before him in order to pass from the reality he sees to the beauty he divines. If we follow him in this career, we see his model transform itself successively before his eyes.... But the artist must give to these creations of his soul the imprint of life, and he can only find this imprint in the individuals Nature has created. The two are inseparable--the type, which is a product of thought, and the individual, which is a child of life." With this excellent analysis before us, we will recall one by one some of the best-known and most interesting works of W.M. Hunt, a painter who now holds a prominent place among the artists of America. We will try to discover by careful observation if the high gifts of Verity and Imagination, the sign and seal of the true artist, really belong to him: if so, where these qualities are expressed, and what value we should set upon them.