intellectual performance, of artistic creation. To the thoughtless man
life is merely the rough and monotonous exterior of the cameo-stone; but
the artist sees through its strata, discerns its layers of many colors,
and from its surface to its vital centre works them all together into
varied beauty. To live is common; but art belongs only to the finest
minds and the best moments. Life is a burden of present multitudinous
phenomena; but art has the simple unity of perfect science, and is
a goal and aspiration. Life comes by birth, art by thought, and the
travail that produces art is ofttimes the severer. The fashions of life
are bubbles on the surface, and pass away with the season; but the
creations of art belong to the depths of the spiritual world, where they
shine like stars and systems in the physical universe.

Story-telling is the most charming of occupations, and, whatever its
relation to literary art, it is one of the graces of the art of life.
Old as the race, it has always been in fashion on the earth, the delight
of every clime from the Orient to the Occident, and of every age from
childhood to second childhood. We live in such a concatenation of
things,--our hopes, fears, loves, hates, struggles, sympathies, defeats,
and triumphs make such a medley, with a sort of divine fascination about
it,--that we are always interested to hear how anybody has borne himself
through whatever varieties of fortune. At the basis of every other
character which can be assumed by man lie the conceiver and the teller
of stories; story-telling is the _primá facie_ quality of an intelligent
and sociable being leading a life full of events in a universe full
of phenomena. The child believes the wonders of romance by a right
instinct; narratives of love and peril and achievement come home to the
spirit of the youth; and the mystical, wonder-expecting eye of childhood
returns to old age. The humor, wit, piety, and pathos of every age
abound in the written stories of its people and children.