should implore our readers, for their own peace of mind, never to know, by this beautiful work, how masterly and how touchingly sublime Doré's pencil can be; but the surety of its legendary character has made it, to us, a study of exceeding interest, and, may we not add, of profit?

We are unwilling to express any disappointment at the selections of scenes which Doré has chosen for his illustrations of the Myth. Some are too gross altogether, to satisfy our conviction that his taste in art is always trustworthy; though if this were the only charge to be made against the illustrator, he might rest secure in the verdict of his age. But, now that he is directing his attention to a kindred pursuit, the higher form of art, we may speak with more confidence of the defects, which, in all likelihood, will detract from the fame which he may achieve in painting. The tragic in art or in literature depends, for its success, on a right conception in the mind of the artist or poet, of the essential elements which should mould the impersonation. Too much labor cannot be bestowed on details, for the closer each minute circumstance is considered and weighed, the more clearly defined appear the differences between what is truly tragic and what is simply startling or revolting. Doré has so exclusively made his studies in the weird, the grotesque, and the unreal, from choice perhaps, that his efforts in expressing the modern, the real, and the human, in life, rather produce caricature than a counterpart of nature. In the rich field that Dante's Inferno opened to him, he reveals a vividness and power which are inimitable. The torturing spectacles which the lost suggest to his mind, move his pencil with an inspiration that adds a new fascination to this portion of the Divina Commedia. In Don Quixote, Doré exhibits too strongly the irrational side of his hero's character. A study of his illustrations leaves on our mind a decided impression that, after all, Don Quixote was a crazed rather than a perverted creature; while the humorous element in Sancho Panza is totally lost to view or displaced by the less welcome aspectthe ridiculous in his character. The farther removed his subjects are from the range of the hideous, the improbable, and the detestable, the feebler grows his hand, and the more pain

fully revolting the conception which he seeks to reduce to form. We think, with pleasure, of the illustrations of the Contes Drolatiques; only, a few sketches provoke us by their grossness. And yet no work from which he has made studies, offers at every turn such scenes as these, in which Balzac rivals in coarseness the vulgarities of Fielding's Tom Jones. The delineation of the lover cut in twain, (in a scene kindred to Le Moyne Amador,) and the heart leaping toward the object of its affections, is a monstrosity as ghastly as it is shockingly revolting. Other studies show, perhaps in a less degree, the same fantastic contortions, which are anything but pleasant to the eye. The Paradiso presents a scope which, in its more ethereal nature, render's Doré's illustrations of Dante's conceptions of rest wholly uncomparable with the success of the Inferno. He seizes the terrifically sublime in the one, and moulds it into plastic shape; but he fails to express a tithe of the tenderly sublime in the other. In Elaine, one of the Idylls of Tennyson, he conveys to our mind about as exact a portraiture of the heroine, as a lewd Dutch girl would, whom Hogarth might have introduced with a more becoming propriety into the Rake's Progress. His pencil has produced simply a caricature. Much might be said, too, of his Lancelot, and the misconceptions and distortions of the poet's verse; as, for instance, Doré mounts his King Arthur, who descends a mountain ridge, and Tennyson's verse at least suggests that he came on foot,

And laboring up the pass

All in a misty moonshine, unawares

Had trodden that crown'd skeleton.'

We note only one of many such inaccuracies with which the Idylls of the King abound, and especially Elaine. The knightly Sir Lancelot, albeit stained with sin, yet courtly still, 'a man not after Arthur's heart,' and sinful Guinevere, who loved him, instead of Arthur, her liege lord, queenly, womanly, yet lacking the high fortitude to act out the better promptings of her better nature, but at the last bitterly penitent, and owning the nobleness of him she wronged-these two portraitures. of the Poet Laureate's ripened power, Doré has failed to grasp.

His illustrations of the Bible merit the criticism of Ruskin, whose opinions on subjects relating to art, always claim a high consideration. Extravagant and paradoxical as his statements sometimes appear, we cannot but perceive the justice with which he deals both with Doré's Tennyson and with his Bible. 'It is to my mind,' he says, 'quite as significant, almost as awful, a sign of what is going on in the midst of us, that' our great English poet should have suffered his work to be thus contaminated, as that the lower Evangelicals, [i. e. radicals,] never notable for sense in the arts, should have got their Bibles dishonored.' A few illustrations in his Bible call for no stinted praise, and we can think with pleasure of the chaste and unaffected beauty of his Susannah in the Apocrypha; but the sacrilegious vandalism with which he has treated the scene of the Crucifixion, is hardly compensated by the mastery of touch he displays in the arrangement of light and shade and the command of perspective, in other designs. No picture of the Crucifixion can satisfy the unexpressible conceptions with which humanity idealizes the last event in Christ's life. It lies beyond the region of the brush of the greatest genius, and the inherent fault of art reproductions of it is not in the artist but in the subject. Who can pencil the inconceivable sorrows which no tongue can clothe in human language? What attitude can art lend, by which the Divine in union with the Human in our Lord will convey half that we feel of the stupendous tragedy? If the closing scene can never be brought within the scope of the painter, at all events, it can inspire an awe which will reverently elevate the artist's mind, and guide his pencil in embodying, however feebly, that which is, in its very nature, incommunicable. Doré does violence to religious susceptibilities, and degrades the noble mission of his art, in his representation of the Crucifixion. We turn in disgust from the picture in which, as by derision, he has made an insignificant cur a witness of the Passion. If judged by his works, he has little religious reverence, and we wish that he possessed a little of that devotional trait of mind which deterred our Allston from making Christ and His Apostles, as Dr. Channing remarked, subjects of his brush." Art, in its grandest and 26 Ware's Lectures on Allston, p. 14.

highest form, is the hand-maiden of truth. It speaks the language of the inner courts of the Sanctuary of our God. To beget and to elevate the aspirations of our humanity, is its sublimest mission. Schiller, with a strong hand, teaches the artist his duty: Free alike from the vain activity that longs to impress its traces on the fleeting instant, and from the discontented spirit of enthusiasm that measures by the scale of perfection the meagre product of reality, let him leave to common sense, which is here at home, the province of the actual; while he strives, from the union of the possible with the necessary, to bring out the ideal. This let him imprint and express in fiction and truth; imprint it in the sport of his imagination and the earnest of his actions; imprint it in all sensible and spiritual forms; and cast it silently into everlasting Time."

ART. IV.-1. Newton's Principia. New York: Daniel Adee.

1846.

2. Dissertation on the History of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences. Part II. By Professor John Playfair. Boston: Wells & Lilly. 1820.

It is one of the sayings of Aristotle, that 'If motion be not understood, we cannot but remain ignorant of nature.' Though Aristotle may not, it is true, have seen all the depth and beauty of his own remark, yet has its justness been illustrated and confirmed by the whole subsequent history of natural philosophy. Indeed, it has now become a maxim, that the true theory of motion is the key to nature.' It was with this key, first constructed and fitted for use by Galileo, that Newton, the great high-priest of nature, entered into her most profound

27 Ueber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen.

recesses, and laid open her most sublime secrets to the admiration of mankind.

Just in proportion, then, as our notions of the great laws of motion are clear, precise, and steady, will nature become transparent to our view, and unfold its beauty in cloudless splendor. The truth of this remark is seen in the consequences of every improvement in the science, or theory of motion. For every such improvement, like an improvement in the telescope, has extended the range, and cleared up the field, of our vision into the wonderful mechanism of the material universe. We shall endeavor, in the present paper, to illustrate and establish this position, in regard to the great fundamental law of inertia; which is usually, and very properly, laid down by philosophers, as the first law of motion.

What, then, is meant by the inertia of matter, and the law which springs therefrom? If we look around us, we shall at once be struck with the vast difference between two classes of objects. We shall see organized, living, spiritual substances; and substances which are wholly dead and passive. In the one we shall perceive, (i. e. by its manifestations,) an inherent principle of activity; in the other, we shall discover only a lifeless mass of matter. This we call inert; because it is wholly destitute of a power to act. An instrument of power it may be, and indeed often is; but in and of itself it is perfectly powerless. Hence, if placed at rest in any point of space, it will continue in a state of rest forever, unless driven from its position by some extraneous force. This constitutes the first branch of the great law of inertia. This branch of it is easily grasped and retained by the mind. So far, then, we have no difficulty;

we are in danger of no error, of no illusion.

But the second part of this great law, is not so easily conceived, nor so readily held with a firm grasp. It is to be reached and realized only by an act of sustained reflection; and even after it has been thus reached and realized, it will often prove an exceedingly unstable element in our minds, and be often found to desert us when our logic most stands in need of its presence, and its power. As we are about to enter upon this slippery ground, then, let us determine to do so with a