On the corner of Washington and School streets is a quaint building, the oldest now standing in Boston. It was erected in 1712 and is known as The Old Corner Book Store. Some of the largest and most influential American publishing houses had their inception in this building.
One must not fail to see Copley Square, the center of artistic, literary and educational life in Boston. Fronting on this square are Trinity Church, commonly known as Phillips Brooks' church, as his pastorate there covered a period of twenty-two years. St. Gaudens' statue of Brooks stands in front of the church. Also facing this square is the chaste and classic front of the Boston Public Library. Two of Saint Gaudens' groups adorn enormous pedestals at either side of the entrance. Inside, on the walls of the grand stairway, are magnificent paintings by John La Farge and others, while on the four sides of the main public room are mural paintings by La Farge, depicting the entire history of Sir Arthur and the Holy Grail.
Just before crossing the river into Charlestown one's attention is directed to a small triangular space surrounded by an iron fence, no side of which is more than five or six feet long, in which is growing a single tree. To this is attached a sign proclaiming that "Dogs are not allowed in this park." Just across the river, not far from Bunker Hill Monument, is the Navy Yard.
The museum of Fine Arts in Boston contains many important works from both the old and modern masters. Here you will see Turner's "Slave Ship." "This picture has been the cause of more criticism than any that has ever been brought to our shores. Every gradation of opinion was expressed from Ruskin's extravagant enconium where he says, 'I believe if I were induced to rest Turner's immortality upon any single work I should choose the Slave Ship; the color is absolutely perfect,' to the frank disapproval of our own George Innes, when he says that it is 'the most infernal piece of clap-trap ever painted. There is nothing in it. It is not even a fine bouquet of colors.' Some one said it looks like a 'tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes.' The lurid light that streams through the mist of the angry sea intensifies a scene already too horrible."
Whoever has seen the peasants of France in their own harvest fields near Barbizon will not fail to recognize the close relations and the intimate knowledge Millet had of these humble peasants. As you gaze at the great mounds of wheat with the crowd of laborers resting, you seem to catch the very spirit of the dignity of labor that the artist so admirably portrays in all his work. You see not only these particular toilers but all the laborers of earth, who by the sweat of their brows make the earth yield her increase.
"His figures seem to be uncouth and of the earth; they are children of Nature who have been so long in contact with the elements and soil they seem to partake of the sternness of the landscape quite as much as the sturdy oaks tried by the storms and stress of unnumbered days of exposure. His Shepherdess is also worth considering and represents his aim in art." These are his words: "I would wish that the beings I represent should have the air of being consecrated to their position, and that it should be impossible to imagine that the idea could occur to them of their being other than that which they are—the beautiful is the suitable."
What poems of grace and beauty the works of Corot are! How well he knew the trees, for he lived among them and loved them. No other artist has so marvelously portrayed the very soul of trees in their swaying, singing, dew-tipped branches. They are vast harps through which wandering breezes murmur aeolian melodies, "morning and evening anthems" to the Creator. His paintings have a freshness and fragrance of the dawn; a mystery seems to hang over them. The very spirit of the morn broods over that classic landscape of his "Dante and Vergil." In the opening words of Dame's Inferno he gives us the vivid setting of this wonderful scene:
"Midway upon the journey of life he found himself within a forest dark, for the straight forward pathway had been lost. He wandered all night and in the morning found himself near the foot of a mountain. He began the ascent but was met by a panther, light and exceedingly swift. He was about to return, but the time was the beginning of morning. A lion with uplifted head, and a hungry she-wolf next he spied and rushed down toward the lowlands where he beheld Vergil, who has come to guide him to his beloved Beatrice."
One should pause to view the "Master Smith." One here sees in very form the character Longfellow so clearly describes in his "Village Blacksmith." It is to the eye what the melody of the poem is to the ear, purest harmony that ever sings the dignity of labor.
One should also pause to admire the "Sphinx" by Elihu Vedder, "The Misses Boit" by Sargent, Winslow Homer's "Fog Warning," John W. Alexander's "Isabella and the Pot of Basil." This last picture we love not only as a work of art but because it is the subject of one of Keat's poems, "Isabel."