LIFE BUDDINGS OF AN ART-DISCOVERER. PERHAJ and fame, he could sacrifice these when won for the martyrdom of the Bastile, rather than tamper with his religious convictions, and become a recreant to his God. Hardly in any age, or to any man, could such lessons come amiss. To young men commencing life in an age like this, when rapidity of life ERHAIS among the literary announcements of the last two or three years, some of our readers may have seen the title of Mr. Morley's pleasant book, "The Life of Bernard Palissy." Or, may be, you have read the still pleasanter book by the authoress of those quaint and pic-tempts to superficialness, competition to selfishturesque fictions, founded upon facts, which "The History of Mrs. Mary Powell" represents, entitled "The Provocations of Madame Palissy." Or, those of you acquainted with French literature, may have met with Palissy's own books, which are full of autobiographical anecdote and illustration, of artistic wisdom, and of Franklin-like shrewdness and homely sense. Palissy is no common man; nor is his a common history. I may even say that, in most respects, he is a model man; a man in whom the practical power of the workman is united with the genius of the philosopher and the virtue of the saint. "The elements So mix'd in him, that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, 'This was a man.'" He is one of those enthusiastic, unfaltering men, in whom passion becomes indomitable will, and pursues its end, regardless alike of the world's neglect and scorn-one of those devotees of art who shrink from no sacrifice, either of personal or relative joy, that their idol may claim-one of those world-conquering men, as powerful in patience as in energy, who can watch and wait, reiterate experiment, and endure privation from weary year to weary year, in the pursuit of what, to ordinary minds, would seem but a vision of dream-land, but which the forecasting instinct of genius affirms to be a possibility of sober life. His life will be no common lesson, if we properly learn it. To see how a self-taught and unaided man can "Voyage through strange seas of thought alone;" how, undaunted by difficulties, unseduced by temptation, undeterred by failure, he can labor through years of darksome and enduring toil; and how, like our English Roundheads, a century later, fighting their very different battle here, he could pray even as he wrought, fearing God with all his heart, and therefore defying the devil and all his works; his natural energy giving practical vigor to his religious faith, and his religious faith again giving substance and persistence to his natural energy; and how, finally, after having, by unparalleled faith and toil, won for himself riches ness, and wealth to unspiritualness, they are of inestimable value. The life of Palissy, indeed, is the best practical solution that I have met with of the problem, "How to make the best of both worlds." It is true that the manipulations of a potter may savor but little of the heroic—a mere artisan modeling clay; but the true lesson of Palissy's life lies in the very unpromisingness of his occupation-the commonness of the material that he wrought constitutes the grandeur of his achievements in it. "He is," says Lamartine, "the patriarch of the workshop; the poet of manual labor in modern days; he is the potter of the Odyssey, the Bible and the Gospel, the type incarnate, to exalt and ennoble every business, however trivial-so that it has labor for its means, progress and beauty for its motive, and the glory of God for its end." He teaches us that genius, virtue, and industry can ennoble any vocation; that it is not so much what a man does that constitutes a hero, as how he does it; he may rule kingdoms ignobly, and carry mortar with honor. Men do not need great fields and epic subjects in order to achieve true greatness. The true hero of life is he who conquers difficulties which conquer other men; who makes his still small voice heard amid and above the clamor that drowns common speech; who touches even common clay divinely. It is true that the career of such a man is a conflict and a toil; that he must shoulder his brawny way amid the great crowd of men; they will not, unless compelled, unite their suffrages to place him first. He would be no hero if they did. His heroism consists in his praise-compelling power; his strength assays and develops itself in action; opposition is needful to test and compel his energies. His first efforts, probably, will be comparative failures; the young eagle may drop into its nest; the potter's enamels may refuse to melt, and his neighbors may think him mad; embryo leaders of the house may be coughed down and covered with derisive laughter, but the failure and the scorn only urge him to greater effort. He vows that "the time will come when they shall hear him,” and he labors in untiring patience and faith, till success rewards his toil, or solid esteem his unswerving virtues. Slowly but surely does the patient coral of his industry rise, till at length it emerges a verdant island of beauty and fertility. In the south-west of France there is an ancient province, formerly named Perigord, now forming part of the department of the Dordogne. At its southern extremity, and upon a hill, not threefourths of a mile from its boundary, stands the little town of Biron, in or near which, about the year 1509, Bernard Palissy was born. A mountainous and inland district, without commerce and without manufactures, its inhabitants depended for their subsistence upon the produce of their forests and the fattening of their pigs; truffles and pork being their chief edible luxuries. It produced, as such districts generally do, a race of hardy, free-hearted, liberty-loving men; no better soldiers were furnished to the armies of Francis I. Palissy, however, the trade came without the titles; he was not only born poor, but he was educated a peasant; and if his family belonged to nobility at all, it was to that very small nobility which repeated dilutions of blood, and divisions of property, painfully constitute. A Plantagenet makes shoes, I believe, in one of our midland counties. "The occupation," says Palissy, "is noble, and the men who work at it are nobles; but several who exercise that art as gentlemen would gladly be plebeians and possess wherewith to pay the taxes." "Is it not a misfortune that has fallen on the glass-workers of Perigord, Limousin, Saintonge, Angoulmois, Gascony, Bearn, and Bigorre, where glasses are so much depreciated that they are sold and cried through the villages by the same people who cry old clothes and old iron, in such a manner that those who make and those who sell them, must work hard to live?"* Alas for the seedy nobles of Perigord! Necessity gives us strange companionships. For the sake of fuel and of wood-ashes used in their manufacture, these glass-workers commonly lived on the borders of forests; and in some retreat of this kind Palissy was probably born and brought up. As for education, "I have had no other books," says he, "than heaven and earth, which are open to all." "God," he tells us, “had gifted him with a talent for drawing," and his curious and enterprising mind would soon make him master of the simple chemistry of his art, and prompt him to speculations and experiments beyond it, unconsciously fitting him for the part that he was afterward to play; so that the natural forms of his pottery, and the chemistry of his experiments in enamel, may very safely be referred to the Perigord forest and the glass-painting of his boyhood, as also that deep and holy love of nature, which no after-seductions could alienate or corrupt. Like many a great unknown, Palissy is his own family. It is not known that he had a parentage the only evidence thereof being a not very violent presumption. Lamartine tells us that the young Palissy, when a boy, kneaded marl and burnt bricks, at his father's kiln, in the village of Chapelle Biron; but Lamartine is not the best historical authority in the world, and too often sacrifices fact to figure-particularly to point. And as Palissy himself tells us, that when he commenced his experiments in pottery, he "had never seen earth baked," we must conclude that, however the kiln in Biron came, in after generations, to be called "Palissy's kiln," it could not have belonged to Palissy's father. "For a long time," he says, "I practiced glass-painting, till I was assured that I could earn bread by labors in earth." We must imagine the young Palissy, therefore, wandering from village to village in the district of Perigord, or in the neighboring district of Agenois, curious in the mosaics of old mullioned windows, and studious of chromatic effects, artistically accomplished in the disposition of bits of painted glass-sometimes, "for the love of Palissy, at about nineteen, felt a yearning for God," doing the necessary repairs to the window better things than glass-painting, now a declining of a church, and sometimes finding a more lucra- trade, and determined to see the world. He was tive job at some old baronial hall. Glass-painting well skilled in melting and coloring glass, as also was one of the most honorable of trades, de-in manufacturing and fixing upon clear glass the cidedly a member of the aristocracy of the man-pigments, which were an easy substitute for the ual arts; and younger sons of noble families, and more recondite art of staining, and also in fitting needy lords with a heraldry longer than their rent-it, when made, into the mullions of quaint old roll, and with more quarterings on their escutcheons than louis in their purses, condescended to live by means of it. Like the old Jews, who prudently taught their children tent-making as well as traditionalism, the French noblesse transmitted, from generation to generation, their aristocratic trade with their aristocratic titles. To Gothic windows; and, doubtless, in this early age, when the wonderful invention of printing was little more than half a century old, and *The Artist in Earth." The extracts from this and other works of Palissy, are taken from Mr. Morley's Translations in the Appendix to his Life of Palissy. being superseded by the less costly and more translucent article which now glorifies our dwellings; so that we hardly know how Palissy subsisted during the twelve years of his wanderings-perhaps he hardly knew himself; no doubt he would tarry longest where glass windows were the most numerous, and where servants were the most de scanty incomings by painting portraits, and making geometrical surveys of estates and plans of houses. "They thought me," he says, "a better painter than I was, which caused me to be often summoned to draw plans for use in courts of law; then, when I had such commissions, I was very well paid." therefore a luxury only of the rich, he both learned and taught many a lesson from the quaint old histories and allegories thus pictorially told. We all know how curiously the eye will trace the features of the building, in which from week to week we sit to listen to long prosy sermons-how familiar every quirk and turn of even the commonest molding becomes; a perfect god-structive. And he tells us that he eked out his send, therefore, would these old painted windows be to the Perigord peasant, while the old weary monk was mumbling his cabalistic Latin, or doling out some rusty legend, or thrice-repeated and monotonous sermon. They would, perchance, inspire musings far more profitable than any of them; for they would depict scenes of wondrous miracle, and of still more wondrous sorrow-the history and the passion, the resurrection and the ascension of the Incarnate Son; the holy symbol of the Dove, too, and irreverent delineations of the Father; together with the solemu scenes of the judgment, and those winged nondescripts, half Cupid, half Bacchus, that do duty in stained glass for angels of blessedness; the unspeakables, also, that symbolize the children of darkness "And saints that there On Gothic windows knelt in pictured prayer." Thus gifted and trained, then, and thus equipped, the young Palissy left his forest-home, and, turning his face southward to the Pyrenees, he entered Gascony "The world before him Where to choose, and Providence his guide." For twelve years he wandered through France, "from the Pyrenees to the sea of Flanders, and the Netherlands. He gathered experience in Britanny, and by the Rhine. He visited lower Germany, the Ardennes, Luxembourg, the Duchy of Cleves, and the Brisgau. He spent some time in his native district of the Agenois, and in the Bourdelois. At Tarbes, the capital of Bigorre, he dwelt some years, and remained long in sundry other towns." Gradually, therefore, he seems to have exchanged his glass-painting for the more lucrative occupations of draughtsman and modeler of images; and yet he complains very sorely of the injury which cast-making did to clever sculptors. "I have seen," he says, "such contempt of sculpture caused by cast-making, that the whole land of Gascony and surrounding places were full of molded figures in baked earth, which had been brought for sale to fairs and markets, and there sold at two liards a piece." Chiefly important to us are these twelve years of Palissy's life, as the principal period of his unconscious education. First, and chiefly, he continued his studies in the great school of nature; he wandered among the works of the Divine Artist, and studied both the forms and the chemistry of nature. Amid the gorges and the peaks of the Pyrenees, he would become familiar with the varied beauty and grandeur of mountain scenery, fantastic and sublime in its forms, transcendent and magical in its hues; and thus, drinking in the spirit of the mountains and the woods, he laid the foundation of his wisdom as a philosopher-he treasured up lessons as an artist, and was filled with inspiration as a poet-he studied earths, and rocks, and insects, and trees-the gray hues of mountain sunrise, and the crimson splendors of his settingBut trades will die out, and occupations become the fresh greenness of the budding leaf, and the superfluous; for science will advance, and social changeful coloring of its gorgeous decay; thus habits will change, and taste will improve; and, educating his soul and his eye, where the true therefore, it came to pass, that Palissy did not artist must ever educate them, in the great school find it very easy to subsist upon glass-painting. of nature. He became, in fact, an accomplished Churches needing his services were not to be naturalist, questioning men much, but nature encountered in every village, and by the impov- more. He visited the laboratory of the chemist erished nobility, the painted glass of their halls and the workshop of the artisan; but he always was felt to be somewhat of an aristocratic nui- turned with eagerness and joy to the perfect sance; for housemaids will be careless, and glass laboratory and productions of nature. Nothing is is brittle, and pictorial fractures were very ex- so palpably characteristic of him, in his artless pensive; and, therefore, painted glass was rapidly revelations of himself, as his nature-worship. Nature was the nurse of his genius, and the mother of his art; she supplied his models, and suggested his processes; and from the rocky bed of the stream, the wild recess of the forest, the awful cleft of the mountain, and the mysterious depth of the cavern, she taught him his lessons, and filled him with the sympathies of a true artist. The secret of nature, like the secret of Him who made it, "is with them only that fear her." Secondly. He extended his knowledge of various arts; he was commendably curious about antiquity, eagerly inquisitive of modern art and science; he even dabbled in alchemy, being, as he tells us, "alchemist enough to live upon his teeth." He spared no pains, grudged no money, whereby he might acquire knowledge. He was an observant student, and eager questioner of the intellectual world of men. He questioned philosophers of their knowledge, and learned wisdom from the rude instincts of the peasant. He sought localities famous for particular manufactures, and connected diverse arts by laying hold of their common principle. He studied books, that he might acquaint himself with the learning of the ancients, and listened to legends which might enrich his inventive imagination. He dreamed the alchemist's dream, and educated his hand to the workman's art. He studied habits of social life, and the various play of human passions. And thus he became, what such a student of men and things must inevitably become, one of the wisest and most practical of philosophers-the Franklin of France. Two other influences were very momentous to him in his subsequent career. One of these was his acquaintance with the doctrines of the Reformation, and the other influence was love. Whether he had carried with him from Perigord the image of some fair Gascon idol, for the fealty and worship of his wandering heart-whether, through these twelve years of peregrination through France, some lodestar shed its bright beams and sweet influences upon his lonely path, refining his thought, and purifying his heart, and concentrating his life, as only a pure love can-whether, in all his toils and privations, he was sustained and stimulated by the "Love that sweetens sugarless tea, And makes contentment and joy agree With the coarsest boarding and bedding" whether he carefully nurtured, all this while, the vestal fire of a first passion, the pure and precious inspirations of a youthful love; or, whether his love was only first kindled at the sober age of twenty-nine, when he married, we are not told; but we may easily understand how such a love might be, as it is to thousands, the earthly power that kept him so pure and unsophisticated, so loyal to truth and virtue during these twelve years of perilous travel, so "simple concerning evil, and so wise to that which is good." Palissy married, and enshrined his Penates in the pleasant and picturesque old Roman town of Saintes, the capital of the province of Saintonge, on the western coastline of France; and there he subsisted by whatever employment his triple capability as glass-stainer, portrait-painter, and surveyor, could procure for him. Here, after twelve years of weary wandering, he found a home; and here, in deep, tranquil happiness, his first years of married life passed. But his children multiplied rapidly; supplies came in slowly; and the activities and inquisitiveness which the first contentments of love and home had allayed, were excited again by the necessities of his family. Victorine could not help wanting a "grassgreen camlet," and little Paul wanted his calotte; and Palissy awoke again to a conscious capacity and yearning for greater things. "Twenty-five years since," says he, writing a quarter of a century after, "there was shown to me an earthen cup, turned and enameled with so much beauty, that from that time I entered into controversy with my own thoughts, recalling to mind several suggestions that some people had made to me in fun when I was painting portraits. Then seeing that these were falling out of request in the country where I dwelt, and that glass-making was also little patronized, I began to think that if I could discover how to make enamels, I could make earthen vessels and other things very prettily, because God had gifted me with some knowledge of drawing; and, therefore, regardless of the fact that I had no knowledge of clays, I began to seek for the enamels as a man gropes in the dark." Ay, and every man who would tread in untrodden paths, and discover unknown things, must "grope in the dark"-at first; grope his way, that is, out of the cavern of ignorance into the sunlight of knowledge. The path may be crooked; projecting rocks may be awkward and hindering, and inflict various contusions upon him; but sooner or later, if a brave and earnest soul, he will find his way out. The cup was a specimen of the workmanship of Lucca della Robbia, the Palissy of Florence; and, like Newton's apple, it set Palissy's mind a-working-only it did not suggest the law that it demonstrated. But why seek to recover what was already known? Because no man in France possessed the knowledge, and Palissy had no square. This arrangement, of course, prodigiously increases the strength of the vessel. means of deriving it. "Somebody," reasoned Palissy, "must have found it out, and why should not I repeat the discovery?" The Conflict and the Coronation of the ArtDiscoverer will form the subject of another paper. "A THE GREAT EASTERN. BY C. ADAMS. ND God said unto Noah, Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion that thou shalt make it: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the hight of it thirty cubits." Reducing these measurements to feet, the ark presents us with a vessel four hundred and fifty feet in length, seventy-five feet in breadth, and forty-five feet in depth-a truly enormous structure, and far exceeding the dimensions of any ship afloat. This last remark has been true from the days of Noah to the present summer; but is likely to be true but a few days longer. There is about to be launched in England a ship to which even Noah's ark must yield precedence, and compared with which all the mighty ships that now plow the ocean, seem diminutive and unimportant. The length of this huge vessel is about seven hundred feet, and its breadth eighty feet. In addition to the above, the hull is divided into several bulk-heads, or compartments, each of which is water-tight-so that though one part of the ship, or even several parts, were to be stove and filled with water, the ship itself, instead of foundering, would go on its way safely, and without interruption, and with scarcely any realization of damage. If it would help to a conception of this monster structure, let it be supposed to stand upon one end, by the side of Bunker Hill Monument, or the Catholic Cathedral, Cincinnati; then the other end would be at a point in the air just three times as high as the apex of the Monument, or the top of the cross of the Cathedral. Or were the ship to be erected, in like manner, by the side of Trinity Church, New York, it would shoot into the air twice the distance of the spire, and one hundred and eighty feet beyond. In our simplicity we used to think a ship of five hundred tuns, as she sat gracefully upon the waters, a magnificent object, and when, in after times, we looked upon a clipper of sixteen hundred tuns, we supposed that perfection had been reached. Still later, however, we saw the "Great Republic," a more wonderful specimen still, and whose shining deck we measured off one day by just one hundred paces. And now prodigious steam-ships are plying between Liverpool and the ports of Boston and New York, bearing the immense measurement of five thousand tuns. One would think that here the ultimatum of hugeness had been attained. But no; a craft manifold more huge and wondrous is forthcoming, along side of which the largest ship afloat is but a It may help the conceptions of those who are unaccustomed to such measurements, when we add that the promenade around the deck of this immense craft will be about one-third of a mile long! The depth of the vessel will be sixty feet,"circumstance." or fifteen feet deeper than the ark. In other words, were it to be viewed resting upon the land, instead of in the water, it would present an elevation equal to that of a city warehouse of eight or nine stories in hight; and the ascent to the deck from the ground is by a flight of ninetyfour steps. Throughout the vessel, up to three feet above high-water mark, the prodigious hull is constructed double. In other words, there are two hulls-one within the other-the space between the two being nearly three feet. These two hulls are connected together by solid iron plates about six feet apart, and running from end to end of the ship; which plates are crossed, at right angles, by similar plates running across the ship at the same distance apart, thus dividing the entire space between the two hulls into divisions of six feet The tunnage of the Great Eastern will be nearly five times that of the largest ship besides in the world! Her measurement will be about twenty-three thousand tuns-or eighteen thousand tuns more than any other vessel. It would be somewhat curious to glance at what this strange ship would bear up, provided the articles could be placed upon it. It would float, for example, all the buildings of a middling-sized New England village; or it would bear up comfortably all the good people of Brooklyn; which people, if they were to stand hand to shoulder, like state prisoners when marching in and out of prison, would form a column of humanity reaching a distance of ninety miles; or from New York to Philadelphia. Or this ship would not sink under the burden of seven thousand full-grown elephants-which, if they were |