We came out into the sunlight after that, and found ourselves very soon in the art-gallery at Twenty-third street.  That was my second visit.  Mr. Kensett, the great artist, recently died, and six hundred and fifty of his pictures are now on exhibition.  In contrast with the dark prison scene, how beautiful the canvas!  Mr. Kensett had an irresistible way of calling trees and rocks and waters into his pictures.  He only beckoned and they came.  Once come, he pinioned them for ever.  Why, that man could paint a breeze on the water, so it almost wet your face with the spray.  So restful are his pictures you feel after seeing them as though for half a day you had been sprawled under a tree in July weather, summered through and through.

Thirty of such pictures he painted each year in one hundred and twenty days, and then died—­quickly and unwarned, dropping his magician’s wand, to be picked up never.  I wondered if he was ready, and if the God whom he had often met amid the moss on the sea-cliffs and in the offing was the God who pardoned sin and by His grace saves painter and boor.  The Lord bless the unappreciated artists; they do a glorious work for God and the world, but for the most part live in penury, and the brightest color on their palette is crimson with their own blood.

May the time hasten when the Frenchmen who put on canvas their Cupids poorly clad, and the Germans who hang up homely Dutch babies in the arms of the Virgin Mary and call them Madonnas, shall be overruled by the artists who, like Kensett, make their canvas a psalm of praise to the Lord of the winds and the waters!

I stepped across the way into the Young Men’s Christian Association of New York, with its reading-rooms and library and gymnasium and bath-rooms, all means of grace—­a place that proposes to charm young men from places of sin by making religion attractive.  It is a palace for the Lord—­the pride of New York, or ought to be; I do not believe it really is, but it ought to be.  It is fifty churches with its arms of Christian usefulness stretched out toward the young men.

If a young man come in mentally worn out, it gives him dumb-bells, parallel bars and a bowling-alley with no rum at either end of it.  If physically worsted, it rests him amid pictures and books and newspapers.  If a young man come in wanting something for the soul, there are the Bible-classes, prayer-meetings and preaching of the gospel.

Religion wears no monk’s cowl in that place, no hair shirt, no spiked sandals, but the floor and the ceiling and the lounges and the tables and the cheerful attendants seem to say:  “Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.”

I never saw a more beautiful scene in any public building than on one of these bright sofas, fit for any parlor in New York, where lay a weary, plain, exhausted man resting—­sound asleep.

Another triumph of Christianity that building is—­a Christianity that is erecting lighthouses on all the coasts, and planting its batteries on every hill-top, and spreading its banquets all the world over.