There is as absolute an instinct in the human mind for the definite, the palpable, and the emphatic, as there is for the mysterious, the versatile, and the elusive. With some, method is a law, and taste severe in affairs, costume, exercise, social intercourse, and faith. The simplicity, directness, uniformity, and pure emphasis or grace of Sculpture have analogies in literature and character; the terse despatch of a brave soldier, the concentrated dialogue of Alfieri, some proverbs, aphorisms, and poetic lines, that have become household words, puritanic consistency, silent fortitude, are but so many vigorous outlines, and impress us by virtue of the same colourless intensity as a masterpiece of the statuary. How sculpturesque is Dante, even in metaphor, as when he writes,—

Nature, too, hints the art, when her landscape tints are covered with snow, and the forms of tree, rock, and mountain are clearly defined by the universal whiteness. Death, in its pale, still, fixed image,—always solemn, sometimes beautiful,—would have inspired primeval humanity to mould and chisel the lineaments of clay. Even New Zealanders elaborately carve their war-clubs; and from the ‘graven images’ prohibited by Decalogue as objects of worship, through the mysterious granite effigies of ancient Egypt, the brutal anomalies in Chinese porcelain, the gay and gilded figures on a ship’s prow,—whether emblems of rude ingenuity, tasteless caprice, retrospective sentiment, or embodiments of the highest physical and mental culture, as in the Greek statues,—there is no art whose origin is more instructive and progress more historically significant. The vases of Etruria are the best evidence of her degree of civilization; the designs of Flaxman on Wedgwood ware redeem the economical art of England; the Bears at Berne and the Wolf in the Roman Capitol are the most venerable local insignia; the carvings of Gibbons, in old English manor-houses, outrival all the luxurious charms of modern upholstery; Phidias is a more familiar element in Grecian history than Pericles; the moral energy of the old Italian republics is more impressively shadowed forth and conserved in the bold and vigorous creations of Michael Angelo than in the political annals of Macchiavelli; and it is the massive, uncouth sculptures, half buried in sylvan vegetation, which mythically transmit the ancient people of Central America.

We confess a faith in, and a love for, the ‘testimony of the rocks,’—not only as interpreted by the sagacious Scotchman, as he excavated the ‘old red sandstone,’ but as shaped into forms of truth, beauty, and power by the hand of man through all generations. We love to catch a glimpse of these silent memorials of our race, whether as Nymphs half shaded at noonday with summer foliage in a garden, or as Heroes gleaming with startling distinctness in the moonlit city square; as the similitudes of illustrious men gathered in the halls of nations and crowned with a benignant fame, or as prone effigies on sepulchres, for ever proclaiming the calm without the respiration of slumber, so as to tempt us to exclaim, with the enamoured gazer on the Egyptian queen, when the asp had done its work,—

Although Dr. Johnson undervalued sculpture, partly because of an inadequate sense of the beautiful, and partly from ignorance of its greatest trophies, he expressed unqualified assent to its awe-inspiring influence in ‘the monumental caves of death,’ as described by Congreve. Sir Joshua truly declares that ‘all arts address themselves to the sensibility and imagination;’ and no one thus alive to the appeal of sculpture, will marvel that the infuriated mob spared the statues of the Tuileries at the bloody climax of the French Revolution; that a ‘love of the antique,’ knit in bonds of lifelong friendship Winckelmann and Cardinal Albani; that among the most salient of childhood’s memories should be Memnon’s image and the Colossus of Rhodes; that an imaginative girl of exalted temperament died of love for the Apollo Belvidere, and that Carrara should win many a pilgrimage because its quarries have peopled earth with grace.

To a sympathetic eye there are few more pleasing tableaux than a gifted sculptor engaged in his work. How absorbed he is!—standing erect by the mass of clay,—with graduated touch moulding into delicate undulations or expressive lines the inert mass; now stepping back to see the effect, now bending forward, almost lovingly, to add a master indentation or detach a thin layer; and so, hour after hour, working on, every muscle in action, each perception active, oblivious of time, happy in the gradual approximation, under patient and thoughtful manipulation, of what was a dense heap of earth, to a form of vital expression or beauty.

Much has been said and written of the limits of sculpture; but it is the sphere, rather than the art itself, which is thus bounded; and one of its most glorious distinctions, like that of the human form and face, which are its highest subject, is the vast possible variety within what seems, at first thought, to be so narrow a field. That the same number and kind of limbs and features should, under the plastic touch of genius, have given birth to so many and totally diverse forms, memorable for ages, and endeared to humanity, is in itself an infinite marvel, which vindicates, as a beautiful wonder, the statuary’s art from the more Protean rivalry of pictorial skill. If we call to mind even a few of the sculptured creations which are ‘a joy for ever,’ even to retrospection, haunting by their pure individuality the temple of memory, permanently enshrined in heartfelt admiration as illustrations of what is noble in man and woman, significant in history, powerful in expression, or irresistible in grace,—we feel what a world of varied interest is hinted by the very name of Sculpture. Through it the most just and clear idea of Grecian culture is revealed. The solemn mystery of Egyptian, and the grand scale of Assyrian, civilization are best attested by the same trophies. How a Sphinx typifies the land of the Pyramids and all its associations, mythological, scientific, natural, and sacred,—its reverence for the dead, and its dim and portentous traditions! and what a reflex of Nineveh’s palmy days are the winged lions exhumed by Layard! What more authentic tokens of mediÆval piety and patience exist than the elaborate and grotesque carvings of Albert DÜrer’s day? The colossal Brahma in the temple of Elephanta, near Bombay, is the visible acme of Asiatic superstition. And can an illustration of the revival of art in the fifteenth century, so exuberant, aspiring, and sublime, be imagined, to surpass the Day and Night, the Moses, and other statues of Angelo? But such general inferences are less impressive than the personal experience of every European traveller with the least passion for the beautiful or reverence for genius. Is there any sphere of observation and enjoyment, to such a one, more prolific of individual suggestions than this so-called limited art? From the soulful glow of expression in the inspired countenance of the Apollo, to the womanly contours so exquisite in the armless figure of the Venus de Milo,—from the aËrial posture of John of Bologna’s Mercury, to the inimitable and firm dignity in the attitude of Aristides in the Museum of Naples,—from the delicate lines which teach how grace can chasten nudity in the Goddess of the Tribune at Florence, to the embodied melancholy of Hamlet in the brooding Lorenzo of the Medici Chapel,—from the stone despair, the frozen tears, as it were, of all bereaved maternity, in the very bend of Niobe’s body and yearning gesture, to the abandon gleaming from every muscle of the Dancing Faun,—from the stern brow of the Knife-grinder, and the bleeding frame of the Gladiator, whereon are written for ever the inhumanities of ancient civilization, to the triumphant beauty, and firm, light, enjoyable aspect of Dannecker’s Ariadne,—from the unutterable joy of Cupid and Psyche’s embrace, to the grand authority of Moses,—how many separate phases of human emotion ‘live in stone’! What greater contrast to eye or imagination, in our knowledge of facts, and in our consciousness of sentiment, can be exemplified, than those so distinctly, memorably, and gracefully moulded in the apostolic figures of Thorwaldsen, the Hero and Leander of SteinhaÜser, the lovely funereal monument, inspired by gratitude, which Rauch reared to Louise of Prussia, Chantrey’s Sleeping Children, Canova’s Lions in St. Peter’s, the bas-reliefs of Ghiberti on the Baptistery doors at Florence, and Gibson’s Horses of the Sun?

The last time Heine went out of doors, before succumbing to his fearful malady, he says: ‘With difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and almost sank down as I entered that magnificent hall where the ever-blessed goddess of beauty, our beloved Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. At her feet I lay long and wept so bitterly that a stone must have pitied me. The goddess looked compassionately on me, but at the same time disconsolately, as if she would say: Dost thou not see that I have no arms, and thus cannot help thee?’

Have you ever strolled from the inn at Lucerne, on a pleasant afternoon, along the Zurich road, to the old General’s garden, where stands the colossal lion designed by Thorwaldsen, to keep fresh the brave renown of the Swiss guard who perished in defence of the royal family of France during the massacre of the Revolution? Carved from the massive sandstone, the majestic animal, with the fatal spear in his side, yet loyal in his vigil over the royal shield, is a grand image of fidelity unto death. The stillness, the isolation, the vivid creepers festooning the rocks, the clear mirror of the basin, into which trickle pellucid streams, reflecting the vast proportions of the enormous lion, the veteran Swiss, who acts as cicerone, the adjacent chapel with its altar-cloth wrought by one of the fair decendants of the Bourbon king and queen for whom these victims perished, the hour, the memories, the admixture of Nature and Art, convey a unique impression, in absolute contrast with such white effigies, for instance, as in the dusky precincts of Santa Croce droop over the sepulchre of Alfieri, or with the famous bronze boar in the Mercato Nuovo of Florence, or the ethereal loveliness of that sweet scion of the English nobility, moulded by Chantrey in all the soft and lithe grace of childhood, holding a contented dove to her bosom.

Even as the subject of taste, independently of historical diversities, sculpture presents every degree of the meretricious, the grotesque, and the beautiful,—more emphatically, because more palpably, than is observable in painting. The inimitable Grecian standard is an immortal precedent; the mediÆval carvings embody the rude Teutonic truthfulness; where Canova provoked comparison with the antique, as in the Perseus and Venus, his more gross ideal is painfully evident. How artificial seems Bernini in contrast with Angelo! How minutely expressive are the terra cotta images of Spain! What a climax of absurdity teases the eye in the monstrosities in stone which draw travellers in Sicily to the eccentric nobleman’s villa, near Palermo! Who does not shrink from the French allegory, and horrible melodrama, of Roubillac’s monument to Miss Nightingale, in Westminster Abbey? How like Horace Walpole to dote on Ann Conway’s canine groups! We actually feel sleepy as we examine the little black marble Somnus of the Florence Gallery, and electrified with the first sight of the Apollo, and won to sweet emotion in the presence of Nymphs, Graces, and the Goddess of Beauty, when, shaped by the hand of genius, they seem the ethereal types of that

Calm and fixed as is the natural language of Sculpture, it is the artistic illustration of life’s normal activity and character in the economy not less than in the ideal and heroic phase. ‘Our statues,’ says one of the quaint personages of Richter’s Titan, ‘are no idle, dawdling citizens, but all drive a trade. Such as are caryates hold up houses; and heathen water-gods labour at the public fountains, and pour out water into the pitchers of the maidens. Such as are angels bear up baptismal vessels.’

Yet the distinctive element in the pleasure afforded by sculpture is tranquillity,—a quiet, contemplative delight; somewhat of awe chastens admiration; a feeling of peace hallows sympathy; and we echo the poet’s sentiment,—

It is this fixedness and placidity, conveying the impression of fate, death, repose, or immortality, which render sculpture so congenial as commemorative of the departed. Even quaint wooden effigies, like those in St. Mary’s Church at Chester, with the obsolete peaked beards, ruffs, and broadswords, accord with the venerable associations of a mediÆval tomb; while marble figures, typifying Grief, Poetry, Fame, or Hope, brooding over the lineaments of the illustrious dead, seem, of all sepulchral decorations, the most apt and impressive. We remember, after exploring the plain of Ravenna on an autumn day, and rehearsing the famous battle in which the brave young Gaston de Foix fell, how the associations of the scene and story were defined and deepened as we gazed on the sculptured form of a recumbent knight in armour, preserved in the academy of the old city; it seemed to bring back and stamp with brave renown for ever the gallant soldier who so long ago perished there in battle. In Cathedral and Parthenon, under the dome of the Invalides, in the sequestered parish church or the rural cemetery, what image so accords with the sad reality and the serene hope of humanity, as the adequate marble personification on sarcophagus and beneath shrine, in mausoleum or on turf-mound?

In truth, it is for want of comprehensive perception that we take so readily for granted the limited scope of this glorious art. There is in the Grecian mythology alone a remarkable variety of character and expression, as perpetuated by the statuary; and when to her deities we add the athletes, charioteers, and marble portraits, a realm of diverse creations is opened. Indeed, to the average modern mind, it is the statues of Grecian divinities that constitute the poetic charm of her history; abstractly, we regard them with the poet:—

Not in their marble beauty do they thus ignobly impress us,—but calm, fair, strong, and immortal. ‘They seem,’ wrote Hazlitt, ‘to have no sympathy with us, and not to want our admiration. In their faultless excellence, they appear sufficient to themselves.’

In the sculptor’s art, more than on the historian’s page, lives the most glorious memory of the classic past. A visit to the Vatican by torchlight endears even these poor traditional deities for ever.

The absence of complexity in the language and intent of sculpture is always obvious in the expositions of its votaries. In no class of men have we found such distinct and scientific views of Art. One lovely evening in spring we stood with Bartolini beside the corpse of a beautiful child. Bereavement in a foreign land has a desolation of its own, and the afflicted mother desired to carry home a statue of her loved and lost. We conducted the sculptor to the chamber of death, that he might superintend the casts from the body. No sooner did his eyes fall upon it, than they glowed with admiration and filled with tears. He waved the assistants aside, clasped his hands, and gazed spell-bound upon the dead child. Its brow was ideal in contour, the hair of wavy gold, the cheeks of angelic outline. ‘How beautiful!’ exclaimed Bartolini; and drawing us to the bedside, with a mingled awe and intelligence, he pointed out how the rigidity of death coincided, in this fair young creature, with the standard of Art;—the very hands, he declared, had stiffened into lines of beauty; and over the beautiful clay we thus learned, from the lips of a venerable sculptor, how intimate and minute is the cognizance this noble art takes of the language of the human form. Greenough would unfold by the hour the exquisite relation between function and beauty, organization and use, tracing therein a profound law and an illimitable truth. No more genial spectacle greeted us in Rome than Thorwaldsen at his Sunday-noon receptions;—his white hair, kindly smile, urbane manners, and unpretending simplicity, gave an added charm to the wise and liberal sentiments he expressed on Art, reminding us, in his frank eclecticism, of the spirit in which Humboldt cultivated science, and Sismondi history. Nor less indicative of this clear apprehension was the thorough solution we have heard Powers give, over the mask taken from a dead face, of the problem, how its living aspect was to modify its sculptured reproduction; or the original views expressed by Palmer as to the treatment of the eyes and hair in marble.

Appropriate and inspiring as are statues as memorials of character, in no department of art is there more need of a pure and just sense of the appropriate than in the choice of subject, locality, and treatment in statuary embellishment. Many greatly-endeared human benefactors cannot thus be wisely or genially celebrated. Of late years there has been a mania on the subject; and even popular sentiment recognized the impropriety of setting up a statue in the marketplace, of pious, retiring Izaak Walton.Shelley used to say that a Roman peasant is as good a judge of sculpture as the best academician or anatomist. It is this direct appeal, this elemental simplicity, which constitutes the great distinction and charm of the art. There is nothing evasive and mysterious; in dealing with form and expression through features and attitude, average observation is a reliable test. The same English poet was right in declaring that the Greek sculptors did not find their inspiration in the dissecting-room; yet upon no subject has criticism displayed greater insight on the one hand and pedantry on the other, than in the discussion of these very chefs-d’oeuvre of antiquity. While Michael Angelo was at Rome when the LaocoÖn was discovered, hailed it as ‘the wonder of Art,’ and scholars identified the group with a famous one described by Pliny, Canova thought that the right arm of the father was not in its right position, and the other restorations in the work have all been objected to. GoËthe recognized a profound sagacity in the artist. ‘If,’ he wrote, ‘we try to place the bite in some different position, the whole action is changed, and we find it impossible to conceive one more fitting; the situation of the bite renders necessary the whole action of the limbs.’ And another critic says, ‘In the group of the LaocoÖn, the breast is expanded and the throat contracted to show that the agonies that convulse the frame are borne in silence.’ In striking contrast with such testimonies to the scientific truth to Nature in Grecian Art, was the objection I once heard an American backwoods mechanic make to this celebrated work. He asked why the figures were seated in a row on a dry-goods box, and declared that the serpent was not of a size to coil round so small an arm as the child’s without breaking its vertebrÆ. So disgusted was Titian with the critical pedantry elicited by this group, that, in ridicule thereof, he painted a caricature,—three monkeys writhing in the folds of a little snake.

Few statues at Rome excite the imagination, apart from intrinsic beauty, like that of Pompey, at whose base, tradition says, ‘great CÆsar fell.’ It was discovered lying across the boundary line of two estates, and claimed by both proprietors. Shrewd Cardinal Spada decided the head belonged to one, and the body to another. It was decapitated, and sold in fragments for a small sum, and by this device was added to his famous collection, by the wily churchman.

Yet, despite the jargon of connoisseurship, against which Byron, while contemplating the Venus de Medici, utters so eloquent an invective, sculpture is a grand, serene, and intelligible art,—more so than architecture and painting,—and, as such, justly consecrated to the heroic and the beautiful in man and history. It is pre-eminently commemorative. How the old cities of Europe are peopled to the imagination, as well as the eye, by the statues of their traditional rulers or illustrious children, keeping, as it were, a warning sign, or a sublime vigil, silent, yet expressive, in the heart of busy life and through the lapse of ages! We could never pass Duke Cosmo’s imposing effigy in the old square of Florence, without the magnificent patronage and the despotic perfidy of the Medicean family being revived to memory with intense local association,—nor note the ugly mitred and cloaked papal figures, with hands extended, in the mockery of benediction, over the beggars in the piazzas of Romagna, without Ranke’s frightful picture of church abuses reappearing, as if to crown these brazen forms with infamy. There was always a gleam of poetry—however sad—on the most foggy day, in the glimpse afforded from our window, in Trafalgar Square, of that patient horseman, Charles the Martyr. How alive old Neptune sometimes looked, by moonlight, in Rome, as we passed his plashing fountain. And those German poets—GoËthe, Schiller, and Jean Paul,—what to modern eyes were Frankfort, Stuttgart, and Baireuth, unconsecrated by their endeared forms? The most pleasant association Versailles yielded us of the Bourbon dynasty was that inspired by Jeanne d’Arc, graceful in her marble sleep, as sculptured by Marie d’OrlÉans; and the most impressive token of Napoleon’s downfall we saw in Europe was his colossal image intended for the square of Leghorn, but thrown permanently on the sculptor’s hands by the waning of his proud star. The statue of Heber, to Christian vision, hallows Calcutta. The Perseus of Cellini breathes of the months of artistic suspense, inspiration, and experiment so graphically described in that clever egotist’s memoirs. One feels like blessing the grief-bowed figures at the tomb of the Princess Charlotte, so truly do their attitudes express our sympathy with the love and the sorrow her name excites. Would not Sterne have felt a thrill of complacency, had he beheld his tableau of the Widow Wadman and Uncle Toby so genially embodied by Ball Hughes? What more spirited symbol of prosperous conquest can be imagined than the gilded horses of St. Mark’s? How natural was Michael Angelo’s exclamation, ‘March!’ as he gazed on Donatello’s San Giorgio, in the Church of San Michele,—one mailed hand on a shield, bare head, complete armour, and the foot advanced, like a sentinel who hears the challenge, or a knight listening for the charge! Tenerani’s Descent from the Cross, in the Torlonia Chapel, outlives in remembrance the brilliant assemblies of that financial house. The outlines of Flaxman, essentially statuesque, seem alone adequate to illustrate to the eye the great mediÆval poet, whose verse seems often cut from stone in the quarries of infernal destiny. How grandly sleep the lions of Canova at Pope Clement’s tomb!

A census of the statues of the world, past and present, would indicate an enormous marble population: in every Greek and Roman house, temple, public square, cemetery, these effigies abounded. According to Pliny the number of memorable statues in Athens exceeded three thousand; the number brought to Rome from conquered provinces was so great that the record seems incredible; add to these the countless statues we know to have been destroyed, the innumerable fragmentary images encountered in Italy, and the variety of modern works—from those which people the cathedral roof to those which adorn private galleries and favourite studios,—and the mind is bewildered by the extent not less than the beauty of the products of the chisel.

We have sometimes wondered that some Æsthetic philosopher has not analyzed the vital relation of the arts to each other, and given a popular exposition of their mutual dependence. Drawing from the antique has long been an acknowledged initiation for the limner; and Campbell, in his terse description of the histrionic art, says that therein ‘verse ceases to be airy thought, and sculpture to be dumb.’ How much of their peculiar effects did Talma, Kemble, and Rachel owe to the attitudes, gestures, and drapery of the Grecian statues! Kean adopted the ‘dying fall’ of General Abercrombie’s figure in St. Paul’s as the model of his own. Some of the memorable scenes and votaries of the drama are directly associated with the sculptor’s art,—as, for instance, the last act of Don Giovanni, wherein the expressive music of Mozart breathes a pleasing terror in connection with the spectral nod of the marble horseman; and Shakspeare has availed himself of this art, with beautiful wisdom, in that melting scene where remorseful love pleads with the motionless heroine of the Winter’s Tale,—

Garrick imitated to the life, in Abel Drugger, the vacant stare peculiar to Nollekens, the sculptor; and Colley Cibber’s father was a devotee of the chisel, and adorned Chatsworth with freestone Sea-Nymphs.

In view of the great historical value, comparative authenticity, and possible significance and beauty of busts, this department of sculpture has a peculiar interest and charm. The most distinct idea we have of the Roman emperors, even in regard to their individual characters, is derived from their busts at the Vatican and elsewhere. The benignity of Trajan, the animal development of Nero, and the classic vigour of young Augustus, are best apprehended through these memorable effigies which Time has spared and Art transmitted. And a similar permanence and distinctness of impression associate most of our illustrious moderns with their sculptured features; the ironical grimace of Voltaire is perpetuated by Houdon’s bust; the sympathetic intellectuality of Schiller by Dannecker’s; Handel’s countenance is familiar through the elaborate chisel of Roubillac; Nollekens moulded Sterne’s delicate and unimpassioned but keen physiognomy, and Chantrey the lofty cranium of Scott. Who has not blessed the rude but conscientious artist who carved the head of Shakspeare, preserved at Stratford? How quaintly appropriate to the old house in Nuremberg is Albert DÜrer’s bust over the door! Our best knowledge of Alexander Hamilton’s aspect is obtained from the expressive marble head of him by that ardent republican sculptor, Ceracchi. It was appropriate for Mrs. Damer, the daughter of a gallant field-marshal, to portray in marble, as heroic idols, Fox, Nelson, and Napoleon. We were never more convinced of the intrinsic grace and solemnity of this form of ‘counterfeit presentment’ than when exploring the Baciocchi palazzo at Bologna. In the centre of a circular room, lighted from above, and draped as well as carpeted with purple, stood on a simple pedestal the bust of Napoleon’s sister, thus enshrined after death by her husband. The profound stillness, the relief of this isolated head against a mass of dark tints, and its consequent emphatic individuality, made the sequestered chamber seem a holy place, where communion with the departed, so spiritually represented by the exquisite image, appeared not only natural, but inevitable. Our countryman, Powers, has eminently illustrated the possible excellence of this branch of Art. In mathematical correctness of detail, unrivalled finish of texture, and with these, in many cases, the highest characterization, busts from his hand have an absolute artistic value, independent of likeness, like a portrait by Vandyke or Titian. When the subject is favourable, his achievements in this regard are memorable, and fill the eye and mind with ideas of beauty and meaning undreamed of by those who consider marble portraits as wholly imitative and mechanical. Was there ever a human face which so completely reflected inward experience and individual genius as the bust which haunts us throughout Italy, broods over the monument in Santa Croce, gazes pensively from library niche, seems to awe the more radiant images of boudoir and gallery, and sternly looks melancholy reproach from the Ravenna tomb?

National characters become, as it were, household gods through the sculptor’s portrait; the duplicates of Canova’s head of Napoleon seem as appropriate in the salons and shops of France, as the heads of Washington and Franklin in America, or the antique images of Scipio Africanus and Ceres in Sicily, and Wellington and Byron in London.

It is to us a source of noble delight, that with these permanent trophies of the sculptor’s art may now be mingled our national fame. Twenty years ago, the address in Murray’s Guide-Book,—Crawford, an American Sculptor, Piazza Barberini,—would have been unique; now that name is enrolled on the list of the world’s benefactors in the patrimony of Art. Greenough, by his pen, his presence, and his chisel, gave an impulse to taste and knowledge in sculpture and architecture not destined soon to pass away; no more eloquent and original advocate of the beautiful and the true in the higher social economies has blest our day; his Cherubs and Medora overflow with the poetry of form; his essays are a valuable legacy of philosophic thought. The Greek Slave of Powers was invariably surrounded by visitors at the London World’s Fair and the Manchester Exhibition. Story’s Cleopatra was the nucleus of charmed observation at Sydenham. The Pearl Diver of Paul Akers is his own most beautiful monument. Palmer has sent forth from his isolated studio at Albany a series of ideal busts, of a pure type of original and exquisite beauty; and many others might be named who have honourably illustrated an American claim to distinction in an art eminently republican in its perpetuation of national worth, and the identity of its highest achievements with social progress.

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