No other art is yet on such a footing among us. Neither is this because of our partially developed civilization. It is equally so abroad; where the nations are oldest and best established in culture, there, too, a similar state of things exists. No school in painting, no style of sculpture, no kind of architecture has made such an impression on the age as its music, as its dramatic music, its opera. This speaks to all nations, in all languages. No writer, though he write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or Lamartine, or Dudevant, can hope for such an audience as Verdi or Meyerbeer. No orator speaks to such crowds as Rossini; no Everett or Kossuth, or Gavazzi or Spurgeon, has so many listeners as Donizetti. For the stage is the art of to-day,--perhaps more especially, but still not, exclusively, the operatic stage; the theatre in its various forms represents the feeling of the time so as Grecian and Gothic architecture and Italian painting have in their time done for their time,--so as no pictures, no architecture, no statuary can now do. Painting and statuary, when they do anything towards representing this age, incarnate the dramatic spirit; the literature that has most influence today is journalism,--the effective, present, actual, short-lived, dramatic newspaper, where all the actors speak for themselves: other literature has its listeners, but it lags behind; other art has its appreciators, but it cannot keep pace with the march of armies, with the rush to California, with the swarm to Australia; there is no art on these outskirts but the dramatic. That travels with the advancing mass in every exodus; that went with Dr. Kane to the North Pole (he had private theatricals aboard the Resolute); that alone gave utterance immediately to the latest cry of humanity in the Italian War.