nature and of God is here asserted.man race. And when the throes which Faust, in the anguish of his scepticism, shook Europe, destroying the old forms. looking at the moonlight, longs to be far of social order, had produced a scepticism off upon the hills, or on the meadows, in the hearts of many, Nature and her and to bathe his pain away in mingled undisturbed repose became the only reflight and dew. When passion is strug- uge for them in the tumult of the world. gling with the sense of duty in his soul, Removing their faith from man, and from he seeks the mountains. We find him the god of his imagination, they reposamong trees and caverns, listening to the ed it in Nature, and in the spirit that tempest and endeavoring to lose his hu- controlled the elements. In England, man troubles in the contemplation of Wordsworth became the high-priest of eternal nature. Again, after the catas- this creed. Shelley, and Keats, and Coletrophe of Margaret's episode it is among ridge, each in his own way, contributed the fields, and pines, and waterfalls of to render it permanent and influential Switzerland that Faust recruits his shat- over thought. The point in which they tered strength. all agreed, was reverence for Nature as the source of intellectual enjoyment and moral instruction. They were not content with the slight attention which had been paid to her more superficial aspects by preceding poets. They ransacked her deeper secrets, dwelling alone with her, exercising their powers of observation on the minutest incidents, and making pictures from hitherto neglected scenes. Man,in truth, had descended from the high tower of his humanity, whence he had been wont to cast a careless and half-patronizing eye upon the hills and pastures that surrounded him. From that time forward he has learned to recognize that not only are men interesting to mankind, but that also in the world itself there is a dignity and loveliness which he must study with humility and patience. This is a great lesson, the whole value of which has hardly yet been recognized. But the progress of the age in physical science, and in the facilities of locomotion, tend to make it every day more widely felt. The more we know of the universe, as revealed to us by chemistry, geology, astronomy, and all our other instruments of discovery, the less we boast that man is the centre of all things. The world and its immensity necessarily occupy our thoughts more duly than in days when wars and politics and metaphysical discussion filled the minds of men. And while we traverse new countries to satisfy our curiosity, or for the sake of health and pleasure, the various objects of natural interest presented to our eyes, explained by science, or admired for their intrinsic beauty, must extend our observation, and distract our cares from petty griefs and from the sense of personal importance. Nature is always made the antidote of human ills. Its peace contrasts with our unrest, its unbroken continuity with our changefulness, the order of its recurring seasons with our chaotic history, the durability of its powers with our ephemeral lease of life, its calm indifference with our fretfulness and intolerance of pain. Shakspeare, in his play of As You Like It, has expressed this aspect of modern sentiment with regard to nature. The lyrics "Under the greenwood tree," and "Blow, blow, thou winter wind." most delicately point the contrast we have tried to draw. But since the days of Shakspeare the love of natural beauty has increased and been developed. He, and the men of his time, cared for the colors, and the scents, and the freshness of the outer world with the keen sensibilities of youth. Man was still uppermost in their thoughts. They loved the earth as a pleasure-ground in which he passed his time. The idea of nature as a vast power -instinct with divinity, from which the human soul, in solitude, might draw great thoughts and inspirations-had not yet occurred to them. They did not find in landscape a mirror of their own emotions, or transfer the feelings of humanity to inanimate objects. This kind of pantheistic reverence has grown up of late years. Rosseau led to it by the doctrine which he preached of returning to a state of nature. In the old age of feudal civilization men imagined a golden period of youth, before the growth of statecraft and class prerogatives. Naked savage life appeared to them, half throttled by the chains and bandages of centuries, to be the true condition of the hu Cornhill Magazine. THE PRESENT POSITION OF LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN ENGLAND. It would be difficult to say much more than has been said by Mr. Ruskin on the modern tendency to Landscape Painting. Any one who touches on this theme must re-arrange, collect, and criticize what he has scattered up and down his works. In comparing our arts with those of the Greeks and Romans, and indeed with those of the medieval and Renaissance periods, we can not but perceive how much of our attention is directed to inanimate nature. The ancients were occupied with affairs of civil life almost exclusively. The passions, sentiments, and thoughts of men seemed to them the only fitting subjects of art. Nor did they regard the outer world, except as conducing to the luxuries and comforts of daily life. The beauty of mountain, sea, and sunlight they no doubt appreciated, but they did not care to represent it as it stood before them. Every fact of nature became humanized before the Greeks admitted it within the pale of art. It was not the river, or the tree, or the cloud they sought to reproduce; but the god of streams, the Dryad, and the master of the clouds. With these personages the Greeks could sympathize. A divine being, not very different in kind from himself, was always present to a Greek. The notion of personality in God, in nature, and in man so filled his intellect that it left room for none beside. Vlittle of this sentiment remains to monotheistic religion, and t the creation, have entirely belief in deities of woods. mountains. Spiritual supplanted the concre mythology, and art) sent subjects of a external characte over sculpture, landscape pain Again, the prominent to tie grounds, i of their religi of Elis, whe the contests velopment most ex constituted the whole education of a Spartan youth, and the music which Plato added to this training consisted for the most part in a cultivation of harmonious sentiments, and of an aesthetical enjoyment of the beautiful. Modern society in this respect is placed upon quite a different footing. Instead of seeing the human form constantly bare before us, and of rejoicing by experience and by sympathy in the loveliness and strength of well-trained limbs, to uncover the person is considered a disgrace, and medieval Christianity has taught us an almost mor bid contempt for the flesh. Our clumsy clothing, and the awkwardness of our movements, distract attention from the beauty of man, and leave it free to occupy itself with other kinds of natural grace. Again, it must be remembered that every man of Greece and Rome had political and military interests, which absorbed his activity, and prevented him from becoming self-engrossed in meditation, or in merely private matters. Each individual citizen was of vast importance to the state when wars were frequent and the families from which the soldier and the statesman came were few. In modern days the size of nations relieves each individual from those responsibilities which weighed upon a citizen of Greece or Rome. The business of public life not sufficient to exercise the facultie all the cultivated classes. There a large body of men who hav within themselves the object Our terest, and to whom polit ma of attractions. Hence sol ed the introspection, and the ves, and loves to be alone ons have place in modern of Greek sense of isolati t to repre- admirably nature and of God is here asserted light and dew. When passion is see he seeks the mountains. We find ught. work. before impres nd, and night inyour fel st contain s the quesin be made feeling. It make them play ntiment must be es they represent. painters sought to terest by placing a the foreground, enggestive occupation. up his pastorals with with dances under trees, Rosa peopled the gloomy rk chestnut woods he loved bandits and soldiers. Rucelebrated landscape of the ry at Florence, has painted the Ulysses landing after his shipon the shores of Phæacia beneath nces and gardens of Alcinous. The is broken overhead; vast rainnds rolling off remind us of the temst that is gone. The figure of Ulysses on the shore suggests the fury of the sea from which he has escaped, while Nausicaa and her maidens seem to welcome e him to fresh sunlight and repose. The ape correspondence between returning calm but in nature and the escape of the hero from thas his perils on the sea, produce a unity of can not conception that makes this picture a fine Toes not poem. Many of Turner's greatest works which all might be taken as examples of the same same way sympathy between the scene in nature which called and the fortunes of some hero or historic f life, because personage. But the landscape painter attention from need not depend so immediately as in , or because the the cases we have cited upon human inle to talk of flow- terest. He may indicate it even in a sts were at stake. It more subordinate degree. Perhaps the the artist to exclaim, most generally attractive of Turner's picpainted them;" or for tures is the "Fighting Temeraire." This hat the story as he painting teems with objects and associabered with extra- tions that provoke the warmest sympaould reply, "So thy; and yet the human life there repreiture and in life; sented is entirely in the background. The t is some one ob- sun is setting over the sea, while the tion, some choice crescent moon stands cold and clear to and that it had made known in Paris its views on the subject-these assertions are drawn entirely from fancy. The surprise of the Vatican on the communication to it of M. Drouyn de Lhuys's despatch of the 12th September was absolute, for so secret had been the negotiations of this understanding that the French diplomatic agents themselves were kept in complete ignorance thereof; while the Nuncio in Paris, almost at the very hour when the contracting parties were closeted together for signature of the Convention, reported to his Government the utter absence of all stir in the world of politics. The knowledge of what had happened came therefore with the suddenness of a thunderbolt on the ecclesiastical circles of Rome, and the method of its reception by these was marked according to their characters. The Secretary of State received the communication with unruffled self-possession and unaltered cheerfulness. Inwardly his feelings were, however, of a different nature, for he felt himself tricked and tricked in a manner that involves peril to the stability of possession, an injury that irritates the angry passions of a soul dearly loving gain. Under the cold pleasant surface of the Cardinal's urbanity, the Convention has been kindling an intense, though guardedly compressed, hatred against the cunning hand that furnished the deadly shaft. But outwardly all was smooth and cheerful, and the impression made by this bombshell was in appearance not a whit different from what would have been made by the most ordinary communication. On the other hand the prelates of an ecstatic complexion burst forthwith into an hysterical chorus of rhapsodies, culminating in convulsively shrill screams of horribly wild incoherence about how the day of God's blessed restoration to his own was now at last visibly dawning in the Convention; according to some a device of heavenly cunning imparted to the Emperor Napoleon for making the sacrilegious folly of impious Italy work its own destruction; according to others a devilish train laid in truth against the Holy See, but which would explode backwards to the sending up of the Evil One himself into the air; while in spite of their shrieks of professed confidence these prelates were yet visibly shaken with spasms of furious anger. All this, however, was put on for the public-the cheerful indifference of Cardinal Antonelli and the whippedup ebullitions of confident predictions by the fanatics; and both parties spoke and bore themselves differently when they met in council upon what should be done by the Pope under the circumstances of the case. There was only one point on which all agreed-some from policy others from conviction. The serious nature of the Convention was to be treated as a chimera. That it even should have entered the head of the French Emperor to carry out the stipulations in the Convention was to be laughed at as an absurd idea. When the two years were passed, the French garrison, it was said, would still continue to do the same duties in Rome it had fulfilled for fifteen years; and to be under a different impression was to exhibit a marvelous capacity for misapprehension. The Convention was a diplomatic move of indeed grave consequences for Italy; but as regarded the Holy See it would be, and never was meant to be otherwise than, a dead letter. As soon, however, as the question came to be to decide on the steps to be taken in consequence of the Convention, this symphony of expressed opinion ceased. Cardinal Antonelli, by nature disinclined to all measures of a startling and bold kind, advocated as ever a policy of abstention. With characteristic aptitude for picking out small creeping-holes, the the Cardinal, congratulating himself on his dexterity, darted on the fact that the Convention had never been brought to the knowledge of the Pope, as a happy plea for quite ignoring its existence and continuing to drift on in hope of better luck. The Convention has formally never been communicated to the Papal Government; and the French despatch of the 12th September, recapitulating the grouuds for evacuating Rome and giving advice for timely measures to be adopted by the Pope (the only document that has been handed to the Papal minister,) makes no allusion to the Convention, signed three days latter, and of whose existence we believe the French ambassador himself to have been ignorant at the time. So tame a policy was quite contrary to the passionate aspira tions of the ecstatic party. The case was one of dire affront to the Holy See; as such it touched to the quick the hearts of all true Catholics, who now would only want the Pope to speak the word to come to his rescue. Between these rival views a contest ensued in the Papal councils; various were the more or less adventurous projects put afloat and talked of until Cardinal Antonelli's adroitness succeeded in devising a compromise. The Catholic Powers, whose sympathies were known, were to be got to express their readiness to furnish to the Pope, with the concurrence of France, the means for material protection, should he stand in need thereof after the evacuation of Rome. In this way the onus would be thrown on the Emperor of appearing publicly in the invidious character of the obstacle that forebade the Faithful indulging in their affections for their Pontiff, if he were to refuse his concurrence, while the means would be offered to the Pope of easily eliciting, without having recourse to violent demonstration, that formidable, though dormant, power of Catholicism in France which it was confidently said the Emperor would never dare to confront. Unexpectedly a bitter disappointment dashed this little project. The Austrian and Spanish Governments announced themselves to be disabled from making the suggested declaration of their readiness to give material assistance by the now recognized law in politics of non-intervention. Cardinal Antonelli contemplated, we believe, to reproduce his project in another shape. He meant to submit the news of the French despatch of the 12th September to criticism in an elaborate note, which he proposed despatching and rendering public as a manifesto immediately after the actual vote in the Italian Parliament for the transfer of the capital-a note in which he would review the whole position, give the grounds why the Pope must decline the suggestions advanced by the French minister for the creation of an army, and by expressing the Pope's determination to leave the settlement of his future condition to Providence and the devout feelings of the Catholic world-in other words, an appeal ad misericordiam that could be made a text of by fiery bishops. This, however, did not satisfy the extreme party. The unexpected defection at a pinch of powers so Catholic and so Conservative produced violent irritation; and the cry was raised how the Evil One was visibly stalking into the very heart of orthodoxy, since even Spain and Austria had not hesitated to express their deference to new principles that contravened their duties as obedient sons of an absolute Pope. Matters had reached a pitch when it was indispensable for the Pope to fulminate a bolt of reprobation that should wither up the rapidly-extending element of defection that so manifestly was decomposing society. The doctrine of nonintervention was the devilish invention that was breaking up all the landmarks of existing institutions. Against it, therefore, was it frantically shouted that a blow must be dealt with all the weight peculiar to the Pontifical arm. Supremely distasteful to the Cardinal, such passionate purposes were to Pius IX. not without attraction, and that attraction became irresistible when their instigators bethought themselves of certain formulas, already familiar to the Pope, and showed how these might be made to figure in support of the occasion. The difficulty that presented itself at first sight was to find a fitting form for a denunciation in the grand style of Pontifical authority against a point of politics so purely technical as that of non-intervention. The Holy See has ever been rigorously careful to preserve in its utterances a tone of grave and general application conformable to its peculiarly canonical pretentions. Since a period, dating back to the beginning of the last decade, the theologians of the Roman Court have been engaged in considering the nature of certain opinions, which had been reported as suspicious. The original opinions, so subjected to inquiry, were the outflow of one or other of the liberal schools in the Church, and stood connected, more or less directly, with Günther's philosophy, the teaching adopted by the Louvain professors, and the cognate intellectual manifestation, that have been the events of our times. The former movers in this inquiry were the Jesuits; and for years Passaglia was specially engaged in |