The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 69, July, 1863: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 69, July, 1863: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
A third series of results will relate to the effect of character in
moulding the features. Go through a "rogues' gallery" and observe what the
faces of the most hardened villains have in common. All these villanous
looks have been shaped out of the unmeaning lineaments of infancy. The
police-officers know well enough the expression of habitual crime. Now, if
all this series of faces had been carefully studied in photographs from
the days of innocence to those of confirmed guilt, there is no doubt that
a keen eye might recognize, we will not say the first evil volition in the
change it wrought upon the face, nor each successive stage in the downward
process of the falling nature, but epochs and eras, with differential
marks, as palpable perhaps as those which separate the aspects of the
successive decades of life. And what is far pleasanter, when the character
of a neglected and vitiated child is raised by wise culture, the converse
change will be found--nay, has been found--to record itself unmistakably
upon the faithful page of the countenance; so that charitable institutions
have learned that their strongest appeal lies in the request, "Look on
this picture, and on that,"--the lawless boy at his entrance, and the
decent youth at his dismissal.
The field of photography is extending itself to embrace subjects of
strange and sometimes of fearful interest. We have referred in a former
article to a stereograph in a friend's collection showing the bodies of
the slain heaped up for burial after the Battle of Malignano. We have now
before us a series of photographs showing the field of Antietam and the
surrounding country, as they appeared after the great battle of the 17th
of September. These terrible mementos of one of the most sanguinary
conflicts of the war we owe to the enterprise of Mr. Brady of New York. We
ourselves were on the field upon the Sunday following the Wednesday when
the battle took place. It is not, however, for us to bear witness to the
fidelity of views which the truthful sunbeam has delineated in all their
dread reality. The photographs bear witness to the accuracy of some of our
own sketches in a paper published in the December number of this magazine.
The "ditch" is figured, still encumbered with the dead, and strewed, as we
saw it and the neighboring fields, with fragments and tatters. The
"colonel's gray horse" is given in another picture just as we saw him
lying.
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