Then the moon, in all her pride,
  Like a spirit glorified,
  Filled and overflowed the night
  With revelations of her light.

  And the poet’s song again
  Passed like music through my brain;
  Night interpreted to me
  All its grace and mystery.

SOMETHING ABOUT PICTURES.

It is not surprising that pictures, with all their attraction for eye and mind, are, to many honest and intelligent people, too much of a riddle to be altogether pleasant.  What with the oracular dicta of self-constituted arbiters of taste, the discrepancies of popular writers on Art, the jargon of connoisseurship, the vagaries of fashion, the endless theories about color, style, chiaro ’scuro, composition, design, imitation, nature, schools, etc., painting has become rather a subject for the gratification of vanity and the exercise of pedantic dogmatism, than a genuine source of enjoyment and culture, of sympathy and satisfaction,—­like music, literature, scenery, and other recognized intellectual recreations.  In these latter spheres it is not thought presumptuous to assert and enjoy individual taste; the least independent talkers will bravely advocate their favorite composer, describe the landscape which has charmed or the book which has interested them; but when a picture is the subject of discussion, few have the moral courage to say what they think; there is a self-distrust of one’s own impressions and even convictions in regard to what is represented on canvas, that never intervenes between thought and expression, where ideas or sentiments are embodied in writing or in melody.  Nor is this to be ascribed wholly to the technicalities of pictorial art, in which so few are deeply versed, but in a great measure to the incongruous and irrelevant associations which have gradually overlaid and mystified a subject in itself as open to the perception of a candid mind and healthy senses as any other department of human knowledge.  Half the want of appreciation of pictures arises from ignorance, not of the principles of Art, but of the elements of Nature.  Good observers are rare.  The peasant’s criticism upon Moreland’s “Farm-yard”—­that three pigs never eat together without one foot at least in the trough—­was a strict inference from personal knowledge of the habits of the animal; so the surgeon found a head of the Baptist untrue, because the skin was not withdrawn somewhat from the line of decollation.  These and similar instances show that some knowledge of or interest in the thing represented is essential to the appreciation of pictures.  Sailors and their wives crowded around Wilkie’s “Chelsea Pensioners,” when first exhibited; French soldiers enjoy the minutiae of Vernet’s battle-pieces; a lover can judge of his betrothed’s miniature; and the most unrefined sportsman will point out the niceties of breed in one of Landseer’s dogs.  To the want of correspondence so frequent between the subject of a picture and the observer’s experience