Kosmon. And, Christian, is a return to this sacred or Christian art by you deemed possible?  I question it.  How can you get the art of one age to reflect that of another, when the image to be reflected is without the angle of reflection?  The sun cannot be seen of us when it is night! and that class of art has got its golden age too remote—­its night too long set—­for it to hope ever to grasp rule again, or again to see its day break upon it.  You have likened art to a river rising pure, and rolling a turbid volume into the ocean.  I have a comparison equally just.  The career of one artist contains in itself the whole of art-history; its every phase is presented by him in the course of his life.  Savage art is beheld in his childish scratchings and barbarous glimmerings; Indian, Egyptian, and Assyrian art in his boyish rigidity and crude fixedness of idea and purpose; Mediaeval, or pre-Raffaelle art is seen in his youthful timid darings, his unripe fancies oscillating between earth and heaven; there where we expect truth, we see conceit; there where we want little, much is given—­now a blank eyed riddle,—­dark with excess of self,—­now a giant thought—­vast but repulsive,—­and now angel visitors startling us with wisdom and touches of heavenly beauty.  Every where is seen exactness; but it is the exactness of hesitation, and not of knowledge—­the line of doubt, and not of power:  all the promises for ripeness are there; but, as yet, all are immature.  And mature art is presented when all these rude scaffoldings are thrown down—­when the man steps out of the chrysalis a complete idea—­both Psyche and Eros—­free-thoughted, free-tongued, and free-handed;—­a being whose soul moves through the heavens and the earth—­now choiring it with angels—­and now enthroning it, bay-crowned, among the men-kings;—­whose hand passes over all earth, spreading forth its beauties unerring as the seasons—­stretches through cloudland, revealing its delectable glories, or, eagle-like, soars right up against the sun;—­or seaward goes seizing the cresting foam as it leaps—­the ships and their crews as they wallow in the watery valleys, or climb their steeps, or hang over their flying ridges:—­daring and doing all whatsoever it shall dare to do, with boundless fruitfulness of idea, and power, and line; that is mature art—­art of the time of Phidias, of Raffaelle, and of Shakspere.  And, Christian, in preferring the art of the period previous to Raffaelle to the art of his time, you set up the worse for the better, elevate youth above manhood, and tell us that the half-formed and unripe berry is wholesomer than the perfect and ripened fruit.