To its sleepless eye lies open all the human heart, and all the stores of nature A frequenter of the highways and thoroughfares of life, the man of genius, whether poet or painter, or architect, is a watcher of events, "the votary of circumstance:" alive to every influence of nature, awake to the varied and complicated truths of existence, he live; with more than life about him; and the difference between the mind of the artist or poe and ordinary minds is this. - to the latter, the model, theme, subject, or whatever else thi groundwork may be called on which the material expressions of genius ore founded, ap pears or sounds in simple unconncctedness, unsuggested and unsuggesting, and exciting no further sensations than are contained within its known limits; but to the true artist i is the type of a past revelation, or the symbol of something intuitively foreseen. It is point in an infinite series, coming down from the past, and leading off to the future in interminable perspective. And thus he to whom is given " the vision and the faculty di vine," sees or hears in his subject that which, till he has materially realised it, is to oth men invisible. - inaudible- The truest, subtlest alchymy is his who, from seeming dross works the true metal of undying thought.

Genius, however, is not always a producer: there are those who are recipients of th tide of inspiration from nature, and yet yield no fruit to the storehouse of Art. They forn and nurture their ideal but for their own solace and delight. Dissatisfied with huma power of execution, and free, perchance, from "that last infirmity of noble minds," the; build only in the region of dream-land, and shrink from all material realization of their works, lest they should betray the grandeur of their subject. They are what a French writer calls the "virgins of the mind," who " die without leaving any trace of them selves behind them upon earth."

The beauty existing in the mind is higher in degree than that in either of the othe realms of the .beautiful: - It may be considered as superior to nature, as no individual however beautiful was its archetype; and it is superior to that in Art, as no power of exc cution can do justice to the conceptions of genius. It is superior both to its ante type an to the image through which it is expressed: the eye never saw it in nature, nor, as I shall by and by endeavor to show, has the hand embodied it in Art. It is neither copied fro a beautiful individual, nor compounded of the faultless features of a species, "create o every creature's best." No beauty was ever so formed, either in the mind or in Art. Th mind operated upon and inspired by the general beauty of nature, has become pregna with a new beauty, greater than all. By what steps the process was conducted we can more explain than we can the production of some vivid dream of the night from dull wal ing thoughts and incidents. The ideal of landscape Art is also in advance of natur every plant, flower, and herb has its Venus or Apollo of ideal beauty: nature's gener beauty has inspired and suggested a beauty beyond the individual, and ideas may be forn ed, and have been formed, of various inanimate objects, which perhaps no individual evi has reached, or ever will.

One object, perhaps, kindled it at first, but by constant study and observation - by catc and partial movement of some limb has developed a new beauty. Grace is beauty in motion, and the motion of animals, as well as of man, is constantly revealing new beauties to the eye of the delighted artist.

Thus is the ideal generated, nothwithstanding the fact that natural beauty of form is dependant on fixed and determinate scientific principles, which are alike applicable to all the arts of design, and which it is the duty of the artist to investigate and study. It is a fact that, by the application of certain rules of proportion, beauty of form is produced in each art, and that the beauty of the face and figure of the Apollo is governed by precisely the same principles that reign in the temples of the Acropolis. This is a truth, however, that does not, what some writers have supposed, set aside the theory of the ideal. It is but a dead beauty that can be produced by rule. Expression is its soul and life, and this cannot be given by rule. We may point out the more prominent effect of the various passions upon the human countenance; but to communicate to marble the light, the glow, the shade of thought, the reflection of the soul on the human face, is the work of genius. The province not of rule, but of intuitive feeling.

It is as true in art as in religion, that the letter killeth, the spirit giveth life.