Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/78

Rh somewhat has the of every creature's best. She has the golden mean without any touch of the mediocre.”

The landscapes in the exhibition gave her "unalloyed delight.” She found in them Washington Allston's true mastery,-. a power of sympathy, which gives each landscape a perfectly individual character. The soul of the painter," she says, “is in these landscapes, but not his character. Is not that the highest art? Nature and the soul combined; the former freed from crudities or blemishes, the latter from its merely human aspect."

Allston's Miriam suggests to Margaret a different treatment of the subject.

“This maiden had been nurtured in a fair and highly civilized country, in the midst of wrong and scorn indeed, but beneath the shadow of subtime institutions. Amid all the pains and penances of slavery, the memory of Joseph, the presence of Moses, exalt her soul to the highest pitch of national pride.

"Imagine the stately and solemn beauty with which such nurture and such a position might invest the Jewish Miriam. Imagine her at the moment when her lips were uusealedy and she was permitted to sing the song of deliverance. Realize this situation, and oh, how far will this beautiful picture fall short of your demands!”

To such a criticism Washington Allston might have replied that a picture in words is one thing, a picture in colours is quite, another; and that the complex intellectual expression in which Margaret delighted is Appropriate to literary, but not to pictorial art.

Much in the same way does she reason concerning one of Allston's most admired paintings, which represents Jeremiah in pridon dictating to Baruch:—

"The form of the prophet is brought out in such