If the writer shall succeed in suggesting to some lucid and comprehensive mind the fact that a noble field for the culture of the human heart and soul remains almost unexplored, and induce one worthy of the task to undertake its cultivation; or if her humble work shall induce one lover of pure art to direct his attention to the glorious promises which it reveals to him of a closer communion with the Great Artist, the beneficent Creator of the Beautiful--she will feel herself more than compensated for her 'pleasant labor of love.' All true art is symbolic; a thought, an idea, must always constitute the significance, the soul of its outward form. The mere delusive imitations, the servile copyings of the actual shapes of reality, are not the proper objects of art. To form a master work of art, the idea symbolized must be pure and noble; the technical execution, faultless. No heavier censure can, however, be passed upon an artist, than that he possesses only the technic or rhetoric of art, without having penetrated to its subtle essence of forming thought. Man is chiefly taught through _symbolism_. Living in a symbolic world of sensuous emblems, he seeks in them a substitute for the wondrous powers of immediate cognition which he lost in his fall. His highest destination is _symbolical_, for is he not made in the Divine image? Through the symbolism of the matter is the soul taught its first lessons in the school of life: when it is known and felt that nature is but the symbol of the Great Spirit, the instinct of our own immortality awakes. In the Old Covenant, the twilight of faith was studded with the starry splendor of a marvellous symbolism; and the new era of the ascending and ever-brightening dawn still bears on its front the glittering morning star of symbolic Christian art. Notwithstanding its earthly intermixture, however it may have wandered from its true source, however sensuous and worthless it may have become, art, in its essence, is still divine. Men devoted to the pursuit of mere material well being, have been too long in the habit of regarding poetry and the arts as mere recreations, to be taken up at spare moments, pursued when we have nothing better to do; as a relief for the ennui of idleness, or an ornament for the centre table; without remembering how many good and great men have given up their whole lives to its advancement; without considering into how many hearts it has borne its soothing lessons of faith and love.