Article #75 - A Picture from Life

 At the corner of a fashionable street – her small bare feet pressing the cold curbstone – sat a little child of that class which the Providence of God permits us to have always with us – the Poor. Tattered garments scarce hold together upon her fragil[e] limbs, matted hair and features disfigured with tears and the dust of the   ??    revealed the old sad story of misery & neglect. She gazed at the people as they passed – sometimes stretching out her tiny hand in a vague appeal for charity, sometimes following with wondering eyes the gaudy dresses glittering jewels

proud forms and joyous faces dancing upon the great tide of life that ebbed and flowed before her

She the while a solitary being shipwrecked upon the beggars curbstone unpitied and unregarded

            And as thus the forlorn one sat the rattle of wheels swept by and a carriage drew up near her. The champing horses threw the foam from their bits and snorted with pampered life. The liveried footman sprang from his box opened the   ??   and assisted his mistress to alight. For an instant there were two children upon that sidewalk one tattered and begrimed with dust, pale with want, weak from sorrow, the other elegantly apparrelled, radiant with health joy & hope. Two young children over whose brows scarce ten years had passed, but with sunlight for the one, shadows for the other. Both were moulded in proportions of beauty, but the hair of the one fell in glossy ringlets and her eyes were bright with happiness while the locks of the other hung tangled and deshiveled [sic] and the light of her childhood was filmy with tears

            The beggars looks followed the footsteps of the child of fortune. O that look, bewildered and strange and longing. O the young imprisioned [sic] soul glimmering through the dim shroud of her neglected beauty! What struggling thought groped spell bound in the childs brain, what mysterious feelings agitation the infant heard

            The fairy figure of one child glided gracefully over the walk and disappeared within a jewel store gorgeous with its tempting treasures. The pale face of the other sank and hid itself in her beggars garments.

            There was no artist there to sketch from life. Where are artists from, save in the old crypts of the past or ministering to the luxuries of the present, or deifying the inanimate works of nature above the living creation around them. And yet verily, the artist who would paint as it should be painted a scene like this would take hold on fame and immortality with a closer clasp than that of a thousand whose works dazzle from the walls of palaces

            The true artist, like the true poet, if he would be great must de[s]cend. He must embrace humanity, idealize the things in whose midst he moves. Hail and welcome to him who shall first preach upon the canvass the fraternity of men, the unity and sympathy which He taught who

said “ye are equal in my Father’s sight” – the simplicity and beauty which He possessed who entreated

            “Suffer little children to come unto me

            And forbid them not;

            For of such is the kingdom of heaven”

This then we conceive to be the mission of the artist who in our day would fulfil his destiny – to seek the springs of human feelings, and follow the aspirations of noble thoughts – to portray weeping and struggling man, and again man emancipated and radiant with lofty hopes; in a word to make glorious his art by ennobling its purpose.