decoration of a pope's chapel in Rome and the wall of a room in
Venice. Michael Angelo wrought the one, and Tintoret, the dyer's
son, the other. And the little 'Dutch landscape, which you put
over your sideboard to-day, and between the windows to-morrow, is'
no less a glorious 'piece of work than the extents of field and
forest with which Benozzo has made green and beautiful the once
melancholy arcade of the Campo Santo at Pisa,' as Ruskin says.

Do not imitate the works of a nation, Greek or Japanese, Italian or
English; but their artistic spirit of design and their artistic
attitude to-day, their own world, you should absorb but imitate
never, copy never. Unless you can make as beautiful a design in
painted china or embroidered screen or beaten brass out of your
American turkey as the Japanese does out of his grey silver-winged
stork, you will never do anything. Let the Greek carve his lions
and the Goth his dragons: buffalo and wild deer are the animals
for you.

Golden rod and aster and rose and all the flowers that cover your
valleys in the spring and your hills in the autumn: let them be
the flowers for your art. Not merely has Nature given you the
noblest motives for a new school of decoration, but to you above
all other countries has she given the utensils to work in.

You have quarries of marble richer than Pentelicus, more varied
than Paros, but do not build a great white square house of marble
and think that it is beautiful, or that you are using marble nobly.
If you build in marble you must either carve it into joyous
decoration, like the lives of dancing children that adorn the
marble castles of the Loire, or fill it with beautiful sculpture,