Speaking of music, the gift is cultivated here to an extent that would set the dilettanti of earth wild with ecstasy!

Music, Poetry, Art, Oratory, and Scientific Research, form the principal occupations of the beings in this immortal world of ours, and language is incapable of conveying an idea of the perfection which our noble and glorious faculties have attained.

Art is about to undergo a revolution.  At present too much attention is given to the literal rendering of a fact, and imagination, which is merely a faculty for reaching the immaterial, is checked; but ere long painters will turn their attention to representing scenes in spirit life, and the inspiration which attended the old masters when they gave wings to their fancy and cut loose from identical imitation, will return.

Let the camera and the photograph reproduce the exact outline and minutiae, but let the artist paint with the pencil of imagination and inspiration!  Only permit imagination to have root in the material world.  As no man can become a good angel who has not developed his physical nature in harmony with his spiritual, so neither painter nor medium can represent the artistic beauties of the natural world, nor of the spirit world, unless he has had a good physical training.  It is only through the physical that the imagination can express itself with beauty and correctness.  Truth is beauty, and is always proportionate; the light equalizing the dark, precisely as in the perfection of art a mass of shadow is balanced by a proportion of light.

One of the most agreeable places of rest or there-abouts is the artists’ rendezvous—­a building larger than St. Peter’s at Home, magnificent in structure, and filled with wonderful paintings.

Here artists and authors of all nations are to be found.  You can step in any morning and have a chat with Lawrence, Reynolds, Lessing, Delaroche Hazlitt, Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Willis, Irving, Anthon, Sigourney, Osgood, Booth, Kemble, Kean, Cooper, Vandenhoff, Palmerston, Pitt, O’Connel, Lamartine, Napoleon, Margaret Fuller, Charlotte Bronte, Lady Blessington, and others of note, who have made themselves illustrious during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  People of congenial tastes and aspirations can readily obtain admittance, and all freely engage in conversation on topics connected with art and literature.

A large garden is attached to the building, filled with every manner of fruit-tree, and is accessible to all; any poor devil of an artist can go there and some bewitching Houri will present him with all the delicious condiments which his taste or fancy can demand.

In these matters the inhabitants of earth need to take a lesson from us.

I prophesy that America will be a pioneer in these reformations, and will, in some Central Park, erect a building similar to this, where aspiring artists may receive food for the soul and the body, and where artistic minds can meet and interchange ideas.