How amazed some will be at the proposition,--amazed that the age should be called an artistic one,--amazed that Americans should be considered an artistic nation! Yet art is only the expression in outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual grace,--the sacrament of the imagination. Art is an incarnation in colors or stone or music or words of some subtile essence which requires the embodiment. We all have delicate fancies, lofty imaginings, profound sentiments; the artist expresses them for us. If, then, this age be one that requires expression for its ideas, that is practical, that insists on accomplishing its designs, on creating its children, on producing its results, it is an artistic age. For art works; a poet is a maker, according to the Greeks: and all artists are poets; they all produce; they all do; they all make. They do just what all the practical men of this practical age are doing, what even the Gradgrinds are doing: they embody ideas; they put thoughts into facts. A quiet, contemplative age is not an artistic one; art has ever flourished in stirring times: Grecian wars and Guelphic strife have been its fostering influences. An artist is very far from being an idle dreamer; he works as hard as the merchant or the mechanic,--works, too, physically as well as mentally, with his hand as well as his head. This is all statement: let us have some facts; let us embody our ideas. Do you not call Meyerbeer, with his years of study and effort and application, a worker? Do you not call Verdi, who has produced thirty operas, a worker? Do you not imagine that Turner labored on his splendid pictures? Do you not know how Crawford toiled and spun away his nerves and brain? Have you not heard of the incessant and tremendous attention that for many months Church bestowed on the canvas that of late attracted the admiration of English critics and their Queen? Was Rachel idle? Have these artists not spent the substance of themselves as truly as any of your politicians or your soldiers or your traders? Can you not trace in them the same energy, the same effort, the same determination as in Louis Napoleon, as in Zachary Taylor, as in Stephen Girard? Are not they also representative?