later pages of this book.

* * * * *

The suggestion that the nineteenth century cannot yet be judged as to its
final effect in many directions has already been made, and of nothing is
this more true than of its Art. Of one phase of this period, however, we
may speak with confidence. No other century of which we know the history
has seen so many changes--such progress, or such energy of purpose so
largely rewarded as in the century we are considering.

To one who has lived through more than three score years of this period,
no fairy tale is more marvellous than the changes in the department of
daily life alone.

When I recall the time when the only mode of travel was by stage-coach,
boat, or private carriage--when the journey from Boston to St. Louis
demanded a week longer in time than we now spend in going from Boston to
Egypt--when no telegraph existed--when letter postage was twenty-five
cents and the postal service extremely primitive--when no house was
comfortably warmed and women carried foot-stoves to unheated
churches--when candles and oil lamps were the only means of "lighting
up," and we went about the streets at night with dim lanterns--when women
spun and wove and sewed with their hands only, and all they accomplished
was done at the hardest--when in our country a young girl might almost as
reasonably attempt to reach the moon as to become an artist--remembering
all this it seems as if an army of magicians must incessantly have waved
their wands above us, and that human brains and hands could not have
invented and put in operation the innumerable changes in our daily life
during the last half-century.