to some extent in the exhibition itself, without making the spectacle
one of confusion. The visitor was enabled to accomplish his double
voyage through the depths of the sea of glass without a great deal
of backing and filling, and to find his log, after it was over,
reasonably coherent.

The articles displayed were ranged under thirty heads. The
preponderance of matter of fact was shown in the concession of four of
these to raw material, nineteen to manufactures, and _one_ to the
fine arts. Twenty-nine atoms of earth to one of heaven! Of course the
one-thirtieth whereinto the multiform and elastic shape of genius was
invited, like the afreet into his chest, to condense itself, had to
be subdivided--an intaglio and a temple, a scarabæus and a French
battle-picture, being very different things. This was accomplished,
and the Muses made as comfortable as could be expected. They soon
asserted the pre-eminence theirs by right divine, and came to be the
leading attraction of the affair, next to the Koh-i-noor. On this
barbaric contribution of the gorgeous East the French observers, a
little jealous perhaps, were severe. One of them says: "They rely on
the sun to make it sparkle," and, when the fog is too thick, on gas.
The curiosity about it, in the eyes of this incisive Gaul, was "not
the divinity, but the worshipers." All day long a crowd filed solemnly
by it under the supervision of a detachment of police, each pilgrim
bestowing upon the fetish, "an egg-shaped lump of glass," half a
second's adoration, and then moving reluctantly on. Thousands of far
more beautiful things were around it, but none embodying in so small
a space so many dollars and cents, and none therefore so brilliant in
the light of the nineteenth century. As this light, nevertheless, is
that in which we live, move and have our being, we must accept it, and
turn to substantials, wrought and unwrought.