The work
will be emphatically original and American, embracing characteristics
that neither art nor literature have yet dealt with, and producing new
forms of artistic beauty from the natural features of the
Rocky-Mountain region, which Leutze seems to have studied broadly and
minutely. The garb of the hunters and wanderers of those deserts, too,
under his free and natural management, is shown as the most
picturesque of costumes. But it would be doing this admirable painter
no kind office to overlay his picture with any more of my colorless
and uncertain words; so I shall merely add that it looked full of
energy, hope, progress, irrepressible movement onward, all represented
in a momentary pause of triumph; and it was most cheering to feel its
good augury at this dismal time, when our country might seem to have
arrived at such a deadly stand-still.
It was an absolute comfort, indeed, to find Leutze so quietly busy at
this great national work, which is destined to glow for centuries on
the walls of the Capitol, if that edifice shall stand, or must share
its fate, if treason shall succeed in subverting it with the Union
which it represents. It was delightful to see him so calmly
elaborating his design, while other men doubted and feared, or hoped
treacherously, and whispered to one another that the nation would
exist only a little longer, or that, if a remnant still held together,
its centre and seat of government would be far northward and westward
of Washington.
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