The English Language Is Slowly And Surely Creeping Through.

Europe; already it rivals the universality of the French.

Two things in this city have struck me singularly, as peculiarly German: one was a long-legged stork, which I saw standing on a chimney top, reminding me of the oft-mentioned "dear white stork" of German stories. Why don't storks do so in America, I wonder? Another thing was, waking suddenly in the middle of the night, and hearing the hymn of the watchman as he announced the hour. I think this is a beautiful custom.

In the morning, I determined to get into the picture gallery. Now C., who espoused to himself an "_Amati_" at Geneva, has been, like all young bridegrooms, very careless about every thing else but his beloved, since he got it. Painting, sculpture, architecture, all must yield to music. Nor can all the fascinations of Raphael or Rubens vie in his estimation with the melodies of Mozart, or the harmonies of Beethoven. So, yesterday, when we found the picture gallery shut, he profanely remarked, "What a mercy!" And this morning I could enlist none of the party but W. to go with me. We were paid for going. There were two or three magnificent pictures of sunrise and sunset in the Alps by modern artists. Never tell me that the _old_ masters have exhausted the world of landscape painting, at any rate. Am I not competent to judge because I am not an artist? What! do not all persons feel themselves competent to pronounce on the merits of natural landscapes, and say which of two scenes is finer? And are painters any greater artists than God? If they say that we are not competent to judge, because we do not understand the mixing of colors, the mysteries of foreshortening, and all that, I would ask them if they understand how God mixes his colors? "Canst thou understand the balancing of the clouds? the wondrous ways of Him who is perfect in wisdom?" If, therefore, I may dare to form a judgment of God's originals, I also will dare to judge of man's imitations. Nobody shall impose old, black, smoky Poussins and Salvator Rosas on me, and so insult my eyesight and common sense as to make me confess they are better than pictures which I can see have all the freshness and bloom of the living reality upon them.

So, also, a most glorious picture here. The Trial of John Huss before the Council of Constance, by Lessing - one of the few things I have seen in painting which have had power deeply to affect me. I have it not in my heart to criticize it as a mere piece of coloring and finish, though in these respects I thought it had great merits. But the picture had the power, which all high art must have, of rebuking and silencing these minor inquiries in the solemnity of its _morale_. I believe the highest painter often to be the subject of a sort of inspiration, by which his works have a vitality of suggestion, so that they sometimes bring to the beholder even more than he himself conceived when he created them.

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