The painters of this class give us glaring colors and violent contrasts; the musicians, antitheses, concetti, ingenious combinations, _tours de force_, rather than flowing melodies or profound harmonies. The power they _wish_, to possess spoils that they _really have_; all _true_ inspiration abandons the hopeless artist in the midst of his ingenious subtleties; it flies before his fantastic conceits; laughs at the follies of his prurient fancies; and withdraws its solemn light from the vain and presumptuous intellect, doting ever over its own fancied superiority. Inspiration, that holy light only vouchsafed to the loving soul, speaks to man in the silence of the subjective intellect. If the heart is tossed by a thousand passing and selfish passions, how can its solemn but simple and tender voice be heard? Suffering such inflated spirits to plume themselves upon the transitory admiration they are always sure of obtaining, it allows them to take the evil for the good; the grotesque for the beautiful; the meteors of vanity for the heaven stars of truth. Such artists love not the mighty arches of gothic architecture, in whose vast curves and dim recesses lurks the mystic idea of the infinite; they take no interest in the ascetic faces which the old masters loved to picture, worn into deep furrows of care by penitence and holy sorrow, though lighted with the triple ray of Faith, Hope, and Love. They have no sympathies with the saints and heroes who have been great through self-abnegation, for such lives are a constant reproach to their own sybaritical tendencies. Constantly mistaking the effervescence of passion for the fire of genius; viewing the sublime realities of religion only as fantastic dreams; seeing nothing but the gloom of the grave beyond the fleeting shadows of the present life; granting reality to nothing but that which is essentially variable, phenomenal, and contingent; forever revelling in the luxuriousness of mere sensation--they understand only that which can be seen and handled. But the devotion to the True in art is a disinterested worship--a worship requiring the most heroic self--abnegation; for the love of fame, of self, of pleasure, will so bewilder and confuse the artist, that he will never be able to sound the depths of any art. And now, can we wonder if pure and earnest men utterly refuse to acknowledge the dignity and worth of art, when manifested to them through the works of fantastically sensuous, or voluptuously sensual artists? This misconception of the true aim of art, of the meaning of the Beautiful--with its natural consequence, merely sensuous manifestations of Beauty through the medium of different arts--has been one of the causes of the violent and inveterate prejudices which have arisen against art itself in the minds of many good men; and, were this view of beauty and art the true one, we could not deny that such prejudices or opinions would be but too well founded.