THE ENGLISH NATIONAL GALLERY.

“A fine gallery of pictures is a sort of illustration of Berkeley’s theory of matter and spirit. It is like a palace of thought—another universe, built of air, of shadows, of colors. Everything seems palpable to feeling as to sight: substances turn to shadows by the arch-chemic touch; shadows harden into substances; ‘the eye is made the fool of the other senses, or else worth all the rest.’ The material is in some sense embodied in the immaterial, or at least we see all things in a sort of intellectual mirror. The world of art is an enchanting deception. We discover distance in a glazed surface; a province is contained in a foot of canvass; a thin evanescent tint gives the form and pressure of rocks and trees; an inert shape has life and motion in it. Time stands still, and the dead reappear by means of this so potent art!

“What hues (those of nature mellowed by time) breathe around, as we enter! What forms are there woven into the memory! What looks, which only the answering looks of the spectator can express! What intellectual stores have been yearly poured forth from the shrine of ancient art! The works are various, but the names the same; heaps of Rembrandts frowning from their darkened walls—Rubens’ glad gorgeous groups—Titian’s more rich and rare—Claude always exquisite, sometimes beyond compare—Guido’s endless cloying sweetness—the learning of Poussin and the Caracci—and Raphael’s princely magnificence, crowning all. We read certain letters and syllables in the catalogue, and at the well-known magic sound a miracle of skill and beauty starts to view.

“Pictures are a set of chosen images, a stream of pleasant thoughts passing through the mind. It is a luxury to have the walls of our rooms hung round with them, and no less so to have such a gallery in the mind,—to con over the relics of ancient art bound up ‘within the book and volume of the brain, unmixed, (if it were possible) with baser matter.’ A life passed among pictures, in the study and love of art, is a happy, noiseless dream: or rather it is to dream and to be awake at the same time, for it has all ‘the sober certainty of waking bliss,’ with the romantic voluptuousness of a visionary and abstracted being. They are the bright consummate essence of things, and he who knows of these delights, ‘to taste and interpose them oft, is not unwise!’”—Hazlitt.