As we wean ourselves from the Old World, and become more and more nationalized in our great struggle for existence as a free people, we shall carry this aptness for the production of beautiful forms more and more into common life, which demands first what is necessary and then what is pleasing.  It is but a step from the painter’s canvas to the weaver’s loom, and the pictures which are leaving the easel to-day will show themselves in the patterns that sweep the untidy sidewalks to-morrow.  The same plastic power which is showing itself in the triumphs of American sculpture will reach the forms of our household-utensils.  The beans of Beverly shall yet be baked in vases that Etruria might have envied, and the clay pipe of the Americanized Milesian shall be a thing of beauty as well as a joy forever.  We are already pushing the plastic arts farther than many persons have suspected.  There is a small town not far from us where a million dollars’ worth of gold is annually beaten into ornaments for the breasts, the fingers, the ears, the necks of women.  Many a lady supposes she is buying Parisian adornments, when Attleborough could say to her proudly, like Cornelia, “These are my jewels.”  The workmen of this little town not only meet the tastes of the less fastidious classes, to whom all that glisters is gold, but they shape the purest metal into artistic and effective patterns.  When the Koh-i-noor—­the Mountain of Light—­was to be fashioned, it was found to be almost as formidable a task as that of Xerxes, when he undertook to hew Mount Athos to the shape of man.  The great crystal was sent to Holland, as the only place where it could be properly cut.  We have lately seen a brilliant which, if not a mountain of light, was yet a very respectable mound of radiance, valued at some ten or twelve thousand dollars, cut in this virgin settlement, and exposed in one of our shop-windows to tempt our frugal villagers.

Monsieur Trousseau, Professor in the Medical School of Paris, delivered a discursive lecture not long ago, in which he soared from the region of drugs, his well-known special province, into the thin atmosphere of aesthetics.  It is the influence that surrounds his fortunate fellow-citizens, he declares, which alone preserves their intellectual supremacy.  If a Parisian milliner, he says, remove to New York, she will so degenerate in the course of a couple of years that the squaw of a Choctaw chief would be ashamed to wear one of her bonnets.

Listen, O Parisian cockney, pecking among the brood most plethoric with conceit, of all the coop-fed citizens who tread the pavements of earth’s many-chimneyed towns!  America has made implements of husbandry which out-mow and out-reap the world.  She has contrived man-slaying engines which kill people faster than any others.  She has modelled the wave-slicing clipper which outsails all your argosies and armadas.  She has revolutionized naval warfare once by the steamboat.