white lily floats upon its bosom; when the oak leaf and the acorn help to form the shade in which we repose, must we go afar to learn how these things were carved by forgotten hands upon the capitals and corbels, in the spandrels and panels and friezes, of sacred buildings, six hundred years ago; or to discover in what way they made beautiful the oaken screens and cabinets in the châteaux of the sixteenth century; or how they were beaten and twisted out of ductile iron in the balconies of Venice, or molded, baked, and colored in the potteries of Palissy and of Sèvres; how they were painted upon the fans or cast on the bronze vases of Japan? On the other hand, the artist says, What are we to do with our heritage of forms? Are we to leave them to the antiquaries to label and classify and set up in museums, or are we to abandon them to quacks and pretenders, the spendthrifts of art, to be worn by them as savages wear the costumes of civilization? In any event, they cannot be forgotten. Every day they are made more accessible. The instinct of mankind is to use them, and we must see to it that they are used in a manner consistent with the dignity of art, with far-reaching research, but with self-control, self-denial, and conscience.

Thus there are two great books of reference for the artist: the book of nature and the book of art, that is, the book of the interpretation of nature by mankind. If we could close the latter and forget it, and if nature were our only resource, the best of us would perhaps become pre-Raphaelite, and we would peep and botanize in a manner commendable to this great prophet. Much of a certain class of errors might be obliterated from modern art; but our imagination, untrained, undisciplined, without food of immemorial experience, would run into unreasonable excesses. The opportunity and the desire to ornament would not be less, but the available resources would be infinitely impoverished. Our obser

vation of nature would doubtless become quickened, but the element of conscience in art would be deadened, if not destroyed. The decorator would soon per

ceive that the natural form could not be sculptured upon his capital, or painted upon his ceiling, or woven in his fabric, or burned into his porcelain, for a thousand obvious reasons, without undergoing some process of transformation. The work of conventionalizing these forms would at once begin; but in the absence of instruction and inspiration from all precedent art it would develop slowly, painfully, with barbarous imperfections and childish crudities. Our art would be a strange mixture: there would be, on the one hand, an absolute fidelity to natural forms, interpreted with the skill which would result from concentration of thought; and on the other, a more prevalent element of barbarous and illiterate invention, covering the surfaces of things with thoughtless repetitions of detail, like an Indian paddle. We would be relieved from our embarrassments of precedent, indeed, but we would suffer from a new and greater embarrassment of poverty. The embarrassments of our wealth we are now learning to correct by cultivating the ennobling qualities of self-denial and conscientiousness. The embarrassments of poverty could only engender an overworking, and consequently a debasement, of the powers of imagination. Man, with an infinity of thought to express, - for no fate but death could stop the activity of the mind, — would have no competent language with which to express it. He could only utter inarticulate cries, like a child.

Therefore, to say that nature is the only fountain of art is incorrect. Ruskin, illustrating this principle, says, "If the designer of furniture, of cups and vases, of dress patterns and the like, exercises himself continually in the imitation of natural form in some leading division of his work, then, holding by this stem of life, he may pass down into all kinds of merely geometrical or formal design with perfect safety and with noble results. . . . But once quit hold of this living stem, and set yourself to the designing of ornamentation, either in the ignorant play of your own heartless fancy, as the Indian does, or according to received application of heart

less laws, as the modern European does, and there is but one word for you, death; death of every healthy faculty and of every noble intelligence; incapacity of understanding one great work that man has ever done, or of doing anything that it shall be helpful for him to behold." There is much more of this very beautiful language, but when we get away from the spell of it and return to facts it seems as if we had been listening to a sort of pantheistic hymn. To go to nature for refreshment and inspiration is always wise; but there is refreshment and inspiration also in the works of man. After God had made the green things of earth and all the animals, the creeping and swimming creatures, he made man, and endowed him with faculties to appreciate, enjoy, and command the rest of the creation. The result was that man immediately began a creation of his own, - a creation of the second order. His materials were not chaos and darkness, but light and nature. The result of this secondary creation is art. To us of the nineteenth century, for whom have been preserved most of the productions of this secondary creation, not by dim tradition but by scientific researches above and beneath the ground far and near, accurately collated, analyzed, and published, to us, richly endowed as none of our predecessors have been (for literature has only discovered the true art of Greece and Syria, of Japan and India, for example, within the last twenty-five years), this secondary creation stands as the image of the primary creation in the human mind; and the human mind, doubtless, is the masterpiece of the supreme creator. By this agency nature has undergone wonderful transformations; and although the water-lily of Egypt, the

1 Ruskin, The Two Paths, pages 46, 47

acanthus and honeysuckle of Attica, the

olive and laurel of Rome, the trefoil, the ivy, the oak, of the Christian builders, the inexhaustible flora of later times, and all the animal creation, from man to insects, by the processes of art have taken new shapes, although they have been often modeled in "the light that never was on sea or land," it is not wise to stigmatize these "old things made new "" as the product of heartless laws, and as a conspiracy against natThere is, in fact, as much nature in the minds which have thus idealized and conventionalized natural forms as there is in the natural forms themselves; and those minds and all the forms of art in which their thoughts have been embodied can no more be neglected by the modern designer than can the primary creation itself.

ure.

This is the thought which I would enforce. Our present conditions of life must give to art in all its forms certain distinctive characteristics. These conditions require the establishment of principles, and not forms, as standards of excellent work. They make forms the language and not the end of art; and they inculcate the enlargement and enrichment of this language by the study of nature and of all the antecedent arts, to the end that we may express our thought in art as we would in literature, with an elegance, precision, and completeness commensurate with our larger opportunities and our greater resources. Modern design, especially in architecture, has hitherto concerned itself with the parts of speech, and given us exercises in grammar. Now we are prepared to give to art its true function; to instruct as well as to delight; to appeal to the intellect and heart as well as to the taste; to have larger scope and fuller meaning in all its expressions.

Henry Van Brunt.

THERE are changing fashions in the public taste for natural beauties as well as for the devices of art. At present the tourist tide sets away from our rivers, and unless they can disport themselves in a waterfall they have little chance of admiration. But the time will come when our wonderful streams will get their due of affectionate regard; when it will be seen that the great rivers of the continent are after all its chiefest glory. Thirty years ago the Mississippi had its rights as the great way over which all the tide of our Western life must flow; but the growth of the iron roads and the change that they have brought in trade have left it comparatively deserted. One of its many unconsidered beauties I wish to make known to those who are willing to seek the beautiful even when it comes in a questionable shape.

The summer of 1874 was one of surpassing warmth and drought throughout the whole of the Mississippi Valley: the heated and shrunken streams were pouring a lessened tide into the main rivers; the Mississippi itself was well drawn within its banks, and the vast forests of its delta had been so far drained of their waters that there was a chance of getting further into their shadowy depths than ever before. As I had long desired to see something of the swamp region of Western Kentucky and Tennessee, I determined to brave the intense malaria that comes from the unnatural baring of the morasses, and make a journey through them. My summer's work had been in the westernmost of the table-lands of Kentucky, a heated region, where the bare ground was an overwarm bed at night with nothing over the body but the air; yet it is a healthful district, rich in noble streams of the purest water, and quite free from malaria; so the change to the swamp belt is like a passage from the Alban Hills to the Pontine Marshes.

The delta of the Mississippi begins at

sea.

Cairo; above that point its waters cut through table-lands and keep a little of the vigor that came with them from the mountains; but after the Ohio and Upper Mississippi join their floods their course is through the land of their own building, made but to be swept away by their ever-wandering stream, as it creeps over the thousand miles that lead to the Even at Cairo the half-finished land has the temporary look that belongs to all deltas; the narrow peninsula that divides the two rivers wastes on both sides in the streams rushing on to their confluence. Imagine New York a spot of uneasy sand, with the North and East river a whirl of eddying and undermining waters, and you have the position of Cairo. Geography has done its best to make Cairo great, but the forlorn place seems to have profited little thereby. There is a look of disappointed ambition in its streets, that unhappy aspect of unrealized greatness that hangs over a thousand or so towns west of the Alleghanies. The death of the Mississippi River trade seems to have conspired with flood and shifting sands to avoid the augury of greatness that is in its name. is but fifty miles down the river to Hickman, where I was to begin my search in the swamps, but there was no certainty of a steamer for days to come. The only way is by rail twenty miles out into Missouri, then back across the river in a zigzag into Kentucky, and then by another double to Hickman. The first thing is to cross the river on the ferry to the Missouri shore; although the river is at its lowest stage, it is scarce ten feet below the levees at Cairo and the yellow tide is gnawing away the land wherever the clinging willows allow the waste. On the Missouri side the landing place, a newly graded way down a bank of twenty feet in height was fast stepping into the whirling water. For hundreds of yards the face of the cliff was all covered with the fresh scars of the land

It

slides, and the wash of the steamer made the water cut out the support of several great masses that slipped at once out of sight in the stream. Several pieces of clumsy engineering, designed to stop the waste, showed their ruins above the level of the river. The railway leads directly away from the river into the back swamps. It starts on land that is always above the floods, as is much of the rim of land along the river, but a short distance carries us down into the swamp levels, and then, for the remainder of several hours' journey, our way is continually through the marvelous mixture of luxuriance and decay found only in these great morasses. The whole region seems even in this season of drought a strange tangle of water and land. The railway runs on interminable trestles over a floor that perceptibly quakes beneath the tread of the train. Every few miles we cross one of the great crescent lakes which are in fact the old horseshoe-shaped bends of the Mississippi, and have been abandoned by the ever-wandering stream; each one half a mile wide, its shore the green wall of the swamp tangle sweeping on either hand quite out of sight. In the still afternoon these lakes are as unruffled as the summer sky. There is an Indian tradition, that has found its way into few of our books, that all this region was a lake just before the coming of the white man, and that into this sheet of water the Mississippi and Ohio emptied by separate mouths. The lake was represented as having been half as large as Lake Erie, covering a large part of Missouri, Kentucky, and Southern Illinois. Some ground for a belief in the possibility of such a lake may be found in the structure of this country. Small rocky islands, such as are made only in open water, are said to be found at several points in the recesses of this swamp, and on their summits it is said there grows an assemblage of trees quite foreign to the swamp vegetation. Moreover, the early part of this century was marked by a convulsion of the most tremendous character, the frequent repetition of which would not be necessary to produce the most important changes in the

geography of the country. The earthquakes of 1811-13 seem to have revolutionized the structure of this district in many of its details; regions which were arable land became swamp, and others which were water-covered became dry land. So great were the disasters that the stricken people were granted new lands by the general government in place of the farms in the convulsed region whence they had been driven.

At sundown the train came again to the Mississippi, opposite Columbus, Kentucky. We were ferried over in a boat that takes the whole train at one passage, and landed below the singular, isolated highland which has made Columbus one of the keys to the navigation of the Mississippi. This is the first and highest of the Chickasaw bluffs, a curious series of lofty islands that stretch along the Mississippi, overlooking its waters from point to point all the way down to Natchez. They are the relics of the ancient delta of the river, made in the tertiary time, when a loftier continent was giving its waste to the river and to the sea. When the French voyagers came to this stream, these steep-walled hills were possessed by one of the tribes of the great Natchez group of Indians, who have left their abundant monuments over the hills. Along these ridges the mound-builder tribes survived to historical times, protected by their swamp moats and natural walls against the more barbarian races that fought their way down from the hungry and hard-limbed North. The great river, forming its ox-bow bends and then cutting them through at the isthmus, is always building fortresses which to savage warfare would be impregnable. The buffalo, which found its way into the eastern part of the Mississippi Valley with the ruder Indian tribes, who by their forest-burning habits opened a way to the unwieldy brutes, never came into this swamp belt. The savages here were preserved from that permanent debasement in which the herds of these animals — a source of easily obtained food and an incentive to a nomadic life — kept the more northern tribes. Here the swamp-entangled

land forbade migrations, while the fertile soil and rivers full of fish conduced to a life of fixed habits and steadfast improvement. No other region north of Mexico had attained to the advancement that had been secured in the centuries of agricultural life led by these tribes of the Mississippi border - lands before the coming of our race. There can be little doubt that they were well advanced in the line of development. Wealth of a communistic kind and something like a decent social order had been created.

The geographical value of these ridges has been even greater to the white man than to the Indian. The natural fortress of Columbus has already played a part in the fate of this country that few fortresses of Europe can claim in their lands. The efforts to gain possession of this key to the Mississippi led to the casting of the lot of Kentucky with the Western rather than with the Southern States. When that commonwealth was endeavoring to hold the impossible neutrality she had chosen to assume at the outset of the past civil contest, the Confederate commander in the neighboring department felt that this point must be secured, for it was to Mississippi what Ehrenbreitstein was to the Rhine. So he trespassed on the bounds of the wouldbe neutral State to possess himself of this stronghold. He failed to remove after a summons from the state authorities, and Kentucky was bound by the conditions of her declaration of neutrality to cast in her lot with the North. So this island of hill-land in the lowlands of the Mississippi became the means of determining the course of a State which more than any other held the key position in the great contest.

From Columbus southward to near the Tennessee line these Chickasaw bluffs are more or less conspicuous features in the topography, forming a succession of islands that rise above the marsh belt and afford admirable refuges from the fevers that breed in the lowlands to the southward. From the steep sides of these table-topped hills we look far over the sombre forests of the Mississippi

Valley, as in their most primitive days. Cultivation breaks them somewhat as ships break the continuity of the sea. Now and then the river sunders the woods with its majestic sweeps. It too seems silent and solitary as the forest. One may watch it for hours without perceiving a trace of human occupancy. De Soto's men could not have seen a wilder river than now rolls through this scarce trodden wilderness. It is impossible to give in words an idea of the magnificence of these primeval forests, where the axe has as yet made hardly a scar. Moving within their caverned shade, or looking through the breaks made by the steep hill-sides over the sombre and boundless plain of their close-woven tops, one experiences a sense of immensity that is not given even by the sea. This forest is an infinity of stalwart struggling through silent life above and a deep, entangled death below. Perhaps in no other region in the world can the varied glories of a primeval wood so well be seen as here. All of North America is peculiarly rich in trees. Where Europe has oaks we have spruces; and many of the beautiful forest trees that once existed in the Old World, and are found there only among its fossil relics, still lift their heads to the sun in this less changed continent. We see here the forests of the North and South mingling their noblest forms. With the white oaks, the sycamores, the tulip-trees, and the other familiar growths that clothe the slopes of the Great Lakes and flourish here with a peculiar luxuriance, we get gigantic sweet-gums with their beautiful star-like leaves, Spanish oaks, the swamp cypress, and a host of other forms that belong beneath a warmer sun.

forests that seem as unbroken

Although the distant views give the aspect of a forest mass quite unbroken by man, we find along this road frequent clearings and many fine farms. The forest wall shuts them in, but fertility seems to dwell in its shelter. The borders of the cypress and the cotton lie close together. So we find here the sometime king of trade; not at his best, but still very prosperous. Maize grows as if em