some had felt it was merely perception; others apprehended it as influx upon the soul from the soul-side of its being.  Then she spoke of the conversation upon poesy as the ground of all the fine arts, and also of the true art of life; it being not merely truth, not merely good, but the beauty which integrates both.  On this poesy, she dwelt long, aiming to show how life,—­perfect life,—­could be the only perfect manifestation of it.  Then she spoke of the individual as surrounded, however, by prose,—­so we may here call the manifestation of the temporary, in opposition to the eternal, always trenching on it, and circumscribing and darkening.  She spoke of the acceptance of this limitation, but it should be called by the right name, and always measured; and we should inwardly cling to the truth that poesy was the natural life of the soul; and never yield inwardly to the common notion that poesy was a luxury, out of the common track; but maintain in word and life that prose carried the soul out of its track; and then, perhaps, it would not injure us to walk in these by-paths, when forced thither.  She admitted that prose was the necessary human condition, and quickened our life indirectly by necessitating a conscious demand on the source of life.  In reply to a remark I made, she very strongly stated the difference between a poetic and a dilettante life, and sympathized with the sensible people who were tired of hearing all the young ladies of Boston sighing like furnace after being beautiful.  Beauty was something very different from prettiness, and a microscopic vision missed the grand whole.  The fine arts were our compensation for not being able to live out our poesy, amid the conflicting and disturbing forces of this moral world in which we are.  In sculpture, the heights to which our being comes are represented; and its nature is such as to allow us to leave out all that vulgarizes,—­all that bridges over to the actual from the ideal.  She dwelt long upon sculpture, which seems her favorite art.  That was grand, when a man first thought to engrave his idea of man upon a stone, the most unyielding and material of materials,—­the backbone of this phenomenal earth,—­and, when he did not succeed, that he persevered; and so, at last, by repeated efforts, the Apollo came to be.

“But, no; music she thought the greatest of arts,—­expressing what was most interior,—­what was too fine to be put into any material grosser than air; conveying from soul to soul the most secret motions of feeling and thought.  This was the only fine art which might be thought to be nourishing now.  The others had had their day.  This was advancing upon a higher intellectual ground.

“Of painting she spoke, but not so well.  She seemed to think painting worked more by illusion than sculpture.  It involved more prose, from its representing more objects.  She said nothing adequate about color.

    “She dwelt upon the histrionic art as the most complete, its
    organ being the most flexible and powerful.