pictures of life, but the artist should have remembered that there is no picture which is not improved by having a frame, and that is lacking here.

- In a small volume, Eduard Zeller has collected certain facts about David Friedrich Strauss, the author of the Life of Jesus and of The Old Faith and the New, two books which are far from being repetitions of conventional theological literature. The biography is by no means an exhaustive one; the author felt his hands bound by the fact that many of the circumstances of Strauss's life could not be explained during the life-time of other persons; but partly to make up for that the writer was for a long time the intimate friend of the subject of the biography, and naturally has full knowledge of many facts which might escape the bookmaker. His style is very ragged; he plays all the freaks possible in the construction of a sentencethose, at least, at which German grammar smiles.

Strauss was born at Ludwigsburg, the birthplace of Mörike, the poet, and of Fr. Vischer, January 27, 1808. He was a delicate boy, prevented by his tender health from entering into the ruder sports of his age, and so driven, not unwillingly, to his books. His father was a shop-keeper in the town, who had descended from some higher estate, bringing with him a love of literature. His mother it was, however, for whom Strauss had the warmer affection; she seems to have been, perhaps not so much a remarkable woman, as it is customary to call the mothers of distinguished men, as an excellent wife and a kindly, admiring mother of her only child who survived its infancy. He repaid her by a strong and lasting affection. From an early age he had been destined for the church, and it was in pursuance of this project that he studied at the University of Tübingen, following the lectures of Kern and Bauer, among others. The lastnamed, the founder of what was called the Tübingen school of theology, that, namely, of sharp criticism of theological books and matters, had an immense influence on his young pupil, whom he had already taught for four years previous to their almost simultaneous departure for Tübingen. In 1830 he finished his studies and became assistant pastor, the curate, so to speak, in a village close by his home. In 1831 he went to Berlin with the intention of continuing his studies under Hegel and Schlei

ermacher, but the first-named, in whom he was particularly interested, soon afterwards died of cholera, and he found no particular pleasure or profit in what he got from Schleiermacher. The next year he returned to Tübingen and began to give instruction in philosophy there with great success; in 1833, however, he felt obliged to give up an occupation too distracting for the persistent work he had proposed to himself, and he devoted himself with great energy to his Life of Jesus. This was the great work of his life, that for which he had been preparing all through his previous years of study and experience. He had been through different states of mind; at one time he had shown a tendency to interest himself in supernatural matters, approaching much more as an already half-believing inquirer than as the cool critic he later showed himself to be; again he was for a time an admirer of Schleiermacher, who, with considerable eloquence, expounded an emotional view of Christianity. This book was of a very different sort; it examined the sacred writings of the New Testament after the keenest fashion, and expounded the author's belief in the mythical origin of much that they contain. The effect of the book was very great, and its fame, as is well known, spread far beyond the boundaries of Germany. It ran quickly to four editions, containing various modifications of the author's opinions. These consisted for the most part of emendations, defense of himself against hostile criticism, criticising others, etc.

The nature of the book was considered so dangerous that the author was obliged to give up the position he had held at Tübingen, and he devoted himself to teaching young boys at Ludwigsburg. Later, the fact that he had been invited to the Zurich University created so much uproar that the offer had to be revoked. Thus deprived of a rare position, he felt himself at a disadvantage in whatever he undertook. He lived restlessly in different parts of Germany, giving his attention principally to literary work which has much less fame, though it is admirable of its kind. He also prepared another, much larger edition of the Life of Jesus, which differed materially from his earlier work. His last book was The Old Faith and the New, which has already been noticed in these pages, and which was in fact a sort 1 See Atlantic for March, 1878.

of postscript to his Life of Jesus, attempting some constructive work in place of what he had overthrown.

Brief mention is made of the correspondence between him and Renan, which made considerable stir at the time; it is needless to say that the biographer has no respect for the frivolity of the Frenchman.

In private life Strauss seems to have been an agreeable man, and very capable

of enjoying the humorous side of what he saw. His married life was unhappy; but he seems to have taken pleasure in his children. What he really suffered from was the way in which the writing of his book threw him out of the lists. It was only natural that this should have been the result, but it forever hampered Strauss. While awaiting any completer biography, this of Zeller will be found of use.

MR. THOMAS MORAN, who two years ago painted a remarkable picture of the Cañon of the Yellowstone, -now the property of the nation, has just completed another large work representing the Chasm of the Colorado, and lately on exhibition in New York, at the gallery of Goupil & Co., Fifth Avenue.

The subject of this important work is the chasm or pit worked by the Colorado River in the sandstone rock over which it flows at this point, as the subject of the other picture was the chasm worked in the limestone rock by the Yellowstone River. The landscape of Mr. Moran's first picture was equally awful and desolate with that shown us in the present work, but its terror was lessened by the beauty and variety of the color with which nature veiled her work of change and destruction. Here, we have no such charm. We are led into a region where the eye has hardly a resting-place, no resting-place, in fact, unless it be turned upward to the sky. For this serene heaven -serene except where in one portion it darkens with the wrath of thunder clouds and the stream of deluging rain- looks down upon the very pit of hell. Only Dante's words seem fit to describe this scene: "There is a place in hell called Malebolge, all of stone, and of an iron color, like the barrier which winds round it. Right in the middle yawns a well exceeding wide and deep, whose structure its due place shall tell. The border therefore that remains, between the well and the foot of the high rocky bank, is round; . . . as is the form that ground presents, where to defend the walls successive ditches begird a castle; such images these made here." 1 It is remarka

1 "Luogo è in Inferno - " Inferno, canto xviii. 1-13. Carlyle's Translation.

ble how in a few words this passage gives us a good description of the Chasm of the Colorado. The color of the rock is there, the yawning well at the bottom of which the unseen river ploughs its way deeper still, and most strange of all, the mighty rock that rises in the middle-distance, a gigantic castle of stone to which all these yawning cracks are the horrible moats! Did Dante in his wanderings ever see such a country? Perhaps Vesuvius or Etna might show something as full of fear if one climbed down into their craters. But, even there, the limited area of the desolation would not allow the mind to forget utterly the supreme loveliness of the nature that lies so near. Here, there is no loveliness for hundreds of miles, nor anything on which the healthy human eye can bear to look (the scientific eye excepted), and this scene is only the concentrated ghastliness of a ghastly region. Some years ago Mr. John Henry Hill went to Nevada and made a number of sketches of the scenery. Among them were several of the region about Virginia City. We had been getting our notions of this country from the conventionalists, and were a little shocked at the naked truth as we saw it on Mr. Hill's canvas. We remember that when the artist was asked what the country looked like, he, who never wasted words, said quietly, "Like hell." Mr. Moran, who is also a truth-teller, brings the same report of a land which is of the same character, only four hundred miles to the southeast.

The spectator stands on a sort of bluff or ledge, and looks across the upheaved land from what may be called the gallery of a huge amphitheatre. The cliffs at his left rise more than a thousand feet from the level on which he stands, but Mr. Moran

has not succeeded in impressing us with the fact of such an altitude. The ledge from which we look is all strewed with broken rocks, and at the right there is seen the base of cliffs that answer to those at the left, but their abruptness is replaced by the sloping bank of debris left by the action of the water. The river in working its way down to the lower level (where it is seen in one or two places shining in its bed like a harmless silver snake) has acted with the caprice of water, and eating into and around the rock has left the most fantastically shaped hills, hillocks, crags, and islands, so that the aspect of things is as if a raging ocean had suddenly turned to stone, and the billows stood fixed, with icebergs and leviathans caught in their huge swing and play. Only a minute description could give its topography. As for the imaginative impression, it needs a poet to translate that into words. Only a word will complete what little picture we may have been able to convey to the reader's mental eye by these hints. Beyond the edge of the chasm we look along the great plain in which it is hollowed, and see the air-drawn tops of the far-sailing mountains shining in soft splendor under a sky streaked with cirrus cloud. This vision of a fairer world is all there is to relieve the impression of turbulent uproar and desolation that oppresses us in the main subject; and the delight expressed in the beauty of this portion, and in the beauty with which it is painted, seems to teach that human beings do not care to look out from the real gloom and sadness of life and experience, upon a landscape that only repeats these shadows. They long for something that speaks of peace and rest.

Although the places depicted in the two paintings are several hundred miles apart, and though the geological structures of the two are widely different, there is yet a superficial resemblance between the two subjects, owing chiefly, no doubt, to the fact that in both we are shown the tremendous action of water, first, in denuding a vast tract of country, and then in boring and cutting its way down to a lower level through immensely thick layers of stratified rock; but another element that undoubtedly adds to the resemblance is a certain mannerism which the artist has contracted, and which shows itself most conspicuously in the treatment of foreground rocks and trees. It would be unfair, however, to give the impression, or, what is the same in

effect, to allow the impression to be gathered, from what we have just said, that this mannerism is sufficient to affect the essential truth of Mr. Moran's work. It is perhaps not enough to make it even superficially untrue, but it is felt as mannerism, and this may mean, we suppose, either a way of doing things, or a way of seeing things. Of course, the two do not, as a rule, long remain distinct. Who gets a habit of seeing things a certain way — and how few do not!-in the end gets a habit of doing them a certain way. Mr. Moran has not yet become a mannerist in his observation, but he may easily become so; the only way to escape the danger is to insist on seeing many things, and as different things as possible.

As we study these pictures we feel that the artist has set himself the task (and it is a very difficult one) of representing the scenes as they look to him; he has not merely taken what nature has done here as a theme, on which to show off his skill in flourishes and variations. Mr. Bierstadt painted the Rocky Mountains and the Yo-Semite in such a way that people of culture who had lived long in those regions could never be brought to tolerate the pictures that for a time drove us all wild with enthusiasm. As there is no clap-trap about Mr. Moran, so there is none about his pictures, and the faults we discover in this latest work are the result of trying to do too much—at least, this is our way of explaining the difficulty. The picture not only crowds too much incident into its comparatively narrow frame, but the subject it deals with is one that never should have been attempted partly because it is impossible to do justice to it, and again because art is not concerned with it, if it were possible. Mr. Moran showed wiser in his first picture. He chose a simpler subject, or at any rate one with more unity. Perhaps we may go so far as to say that the first picture had a subject, and that this one has none. It was said by one who looked at it, "There is no use in trying to paint all out-of-doors." But all out-of-doors might be painted. Turner did it several times in "Chateau Gaillard" (Rivers of France) for instance. But, to be painted, all out-of-doors must be behaving itself. And the country round about the great Chasm of the Colorado is, not to speak it profanely, on a bender. It is a demoralized land, and the lover of nature will turn his head away from the spectacle until the tantrum is over. Of

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course, if Mr. Moran set out to give us an accurate survey of this dreary, uninhabitable land to let us know exactly how it looks there is no doubt that, apart from the necessary exaggeration that comes of grouping the horrors together that in nature are more widely separated, he has done us all a scientific service, and we admit that the work on this score was well worth doing. But no artist we have is better aware than Mr. Moran that, to do this alone, is not to make a picture, it is to make a map; and he meant to make not a map, but a picture. The Cañon of the Yellowstone was a picture, and Mr. Moran showed how much he is an artist by the successful way in which, while he satisfied all the demands of the scientific, and produced a portrait of the spot that satisfied the literal, and that geologists stood ready to swear by, he gave to the eerie scene

-"the light that never was on sea or land, The consecration, and the poet's dream."

The Cañon of the Yellowstone, albeit it did not please those critics who insist on applying laws they have codified from the practice of contemporary French artists to the whole art of landscape-painting, no matter where produced, was a singularly beautiful and original work. The composition was very skillfully managed, and the harmony of color had its instinctive centre -as unconsciously and happily felt, not reasoned, as the key word of a true poet's verse- - in the glint of the sapphire river that swept with all its garnered sunshine down to the bottom of the monstrous world.

Mr. Moran's new picture is wanting almost entirely in the beauty that distinguished his earlier work, and, to many, when that has been said, all has been said. We, too, feel that, great as is the praise of truth when it can as in this case be justly given to a picture, it would be greater praise to be able to say that the truth has been told, not of a land that makes real the darkest picture Dante has drawn of hell, but of the common world. We confess to being weary of sensation landscapes, and we feel that the delight many of our countrymen take in them is an indication of a somewhat childish apprehension of the true end of art, a condition of mind however in which we are of course by no means solitary. The only aim of art is to feed the sense of beauty; it has no right to meddle with horrors and desolations.

But we must not leave Mr. Moran's scholarly and earnest work without giving it, for our own sake, the praise we feel to be its due. Though the composition is muddled and confused, and the color monotonous, and the sense of height absent, yet there is distance wonderfully expressed, most exquisite painting of sky and cloud over the plateau at the right, and lovely lightness and motion in the mist that forms in the clefts of the rocks, and rises to be dispersed in the palpitating heat of the upper air. All that is most difficult to be expressed by paint is expressed here with a skill that approaches perfection, and if, as we think, Mr. Moran has failed to cope with the difficulties of his subject, he has yet in this picture given new evidence, if any were needed, of his ability to deal with the beauty and the serenity of the nature we all know and love.

- Mr. John La Farge has lately exhibited in Boston some pictures which could not fail of giving delight and satisfaction to those who recognize with pleasure a poetic reflection of nature in the art of the painter. We did not find concise or consecutive design in them; but that we hardly cared to look for in productions of a genius so refreshingly unique as this. There were two figure-subjects, three flower-pieces, three landscapes, in the group. Of the landscapes, we liked best that representing the clearing-off of fog on the sea-shore. A rich, rusty, orange passage of weed and lichened rock, on the left, draws the eye to the white mist, thick and warm, ascending beyond it. This mist passes into a very faintly tinted mauvecolored mass, in the right background, which moves slowly off, under a pale green sky, from the level face of the sea. mist seems actually to move. The sea is slowly revealed from under it, so that we hardly determine at what point the eye pauses in its glimpse, feeling in advance the sight of that expanse not yet visible. At the hither edge of the sea a breadth of yellow sand is drawn distantly across the picture. Nearer to us is a rock, from which grows a low, dark-green cedar, with a deep shadow of resinous red beneath it, a true effect we do not remember to have seen noticed by our landscape painters heretofore. The foreground is a luxurious, expansive outspreading of rich, soft, sea-side green, with a dull, pale streak of still water near by. The painter's sympathy with color in every part is intense and

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exquisite; but one feels also, that while yielding himself to its delicious influence, he has somehow wooed from it a secret of interior truth and significance only partially surmised by the spectator. This is hardly a clear statement, but comes as near as anything will, to conveying a sense of the mystical character of Mr. La Farge's coloring.

The

Another of the landscapes, a small winter-scene, is in some respects one of the most remarkable we have ever seen. It gradually unfolds a nearly endless variety where one would expect, if not monotony, at least closely limited resources. horizon is placed at about half-way up the picture all below is a sloping field covered with snow; all above, snowy sky. There is no impossible, conventional multiplication of white specks, to indicate the falling flakes, but the air is nevertheless full of snowiness. It is the spirit of winter which has been seized and depicted, along with all sufficient sensible and visible elements of such a scene. The materials of the picture, however, are almost ludicrously scanty, for description. The only distinct incident in the whole piece is a little tree (a scruboak?) in the foreground, with a half-dozen or more clusters of brown leaves hanging to it. At some distance behind, is the slightly curving outline of the hill, along which grows a dim, bare wood, blinded with filmy white. The gradations of the blue-gray snowy sky above, and of the field below, are extraordinary. There is discoverable in the snow on the ground an ethereal tinge of pink; so ethereal, that it only appears at instants, in an evanescent way. Between the tree and the wood, there is a tint of green in it. On the left, the snow has been trampled, or else scattered a little by winds, and has become blue. Also a little brook-bed, or other depression in the ground, is faintly marked by blue and violet. It will be seen at once that such a picture as this is not a composition; and yet these little fluctuations in the color of the snow become as important, if we once drop into the mood of the painter, as more striking events in works where the scale of interests is less delicately graduated. Glanced at casually, among other pictures, this small canvas would not attract a moment's attention from the average amateur. Yet, as we let our eyes fall into it, the impression becomes increasingly stronger that there is invention in it, somewhere. That is, we

are not altogether sure that Mr. La Farge saw just this, and no more, no less, out of his window, and then sat down to match the different parts, with carefully mixed colors; on the contrary, we get a feeling that he has developed this little reverie of faint tones as a tender fantasy, improvising, as he went on, turns and inflections of hue, as they became necessary to the general harmony.

Of the flower-pieces the most successful was that in which three June-roses appear among thick-clustering leaves. The blossoms mark the points of a triangle, one being at the bottom, and two above. The pervading tone is rich, subdued, and sweet; and the skill with which one of the rose-leaves, lighted with very bright yellow, is worked into harmony with the rest, is admirable. The other two flower-pieces are more unique, and in some ways more attractive, but not so completely wrought out. Both are experiments in the same direction, that of placing a small tray or saucer of various flowers in close juxtaposition with white hangings; in one case window-curtains, with a vague vista out of the window. The window-curtains, however, are too heavy an accompaniment, and degenerate into a disproportionate mass of whiteness. In the other piece, the flowers-a yellow rose, with some pink ones, and pansies, and a few small crimson blossoms lie on a Japanese tray, and are delicately reflected in the lacquered surface; while the white draperies behind are sustained by a soft seeking-out of blue and purplish shadow and yellow light, as characteristic as the color-blendings already noticed in the little winter-piece. The flowers, considered apart, are painted with exquisite grace. A primrose is clearly much more than a primrose to Mr. La Farge: at a little distance, these blossoms are deliciously fair and fragile and evanescent, yet, when scrutinized closely, they prove to be drawn with greatest care and nicety.

Of the figure-pieces, one portrayed a reclining woman, and was distinguished by a certain dreamy languor of coloring and sentiment; as a picture, it savored somewhat of influence from Japanese decorative art. The other presented a crimsongowned, green-turbaned man, sitting in a field under trees, and strumming upon a long-handled guitar. A slight, pervasive mist causes the spectator to feel his way slowly into the background of green in