Among her thronged emotions we look in vain for shame.  Her nakedness is a coarse chance of her overwhelming situation, for which she is no more concerned than for her galled wrists or her dishevelled hair.  What is it to such a queen as she, that the eyes of grinning brutes are blessed by her perfect beauties?

The qualities which constitute true greatness in a statue such as this are, if we apprehend them aright,—­first, that sublime simplicity of Idea which omnipotently sways the beholder, and alike inspires his coarseness or his culture; next, that personality, that moving humanness of feeling, which holds him by his very heart-strings, and makes him forget its marble, to accept its flesh and blood; and, finally, that wondrous skill of nice manipulation, which, neglecting nothing in the myriad of anatomical and physiological details,—­not even the faintest sigh or the dimmest tremor,—­tells, fibre by fibre, a tale that all may read, and comes to us with a story “to hold children from play and old men from the chimney-corner.”

Tried by this definition, we believe the “White Captive” proves its claim to genuine greatness, and that it will presently take its place, with the world’s consent, in the front rank of modern statues,—­good among the best, in the flesh-and-bloodness and the soul of it.  It is original, it is faithful, it is American; our women may look upon it, and say, “She is one of us,” with more satisfaction than the Greek women could have derived from the Venus de’ Medici, with its insignificant head and its impossible spine.

Especially true to the American type, as compared in statues with the familiar Greek, the head of the “White Captive” is large; but that it is too large, or in excess of the least of a thousand female heads that have been gathered around it since it was first exposed to the public scrutiny, we have failed to discover in repeated and careful examinations; and we are constrained to commend such as may be exercised on that point to the critical flippancies of the jaunty gentlemen who find the hips at once too broad and too narrow, the bosom too full and too young, the arms too meagre and too stout.

FOREST PHOTOGRAPHS.

We call the attention of our readers to a series of twelve photographic views of forest and lake scenery published by Mr. J.W.  Black, Boston, from negatives taken by Mr. Stillman in the Adirondack country.  The points of view are chosen with the fine feeling of an artist, and the tangled profusion and grace of the forest, with the moment’s whim of sunfleck and shadow, are given with exquisite delicacy.  Whatever the all-beholding sun could see in those woodland depths we have here,—­sketches of the shaggy Pan snatched at unawares in sleep.  One may study these pictures till he becomes as familiar as a squirrel with fern and tree-bark and moose-wood and lichen, till he knows every trunk and twig and leaf as intimately as a sunbeam.