in nothing more than the progress of art after a certain period of its development, and when its mere mechanism is best understood, and applied in the most masterly manner.  The spirit has tarried behind, and we have to return to seek it among the earlier days, when the genius of man was like a giant, rude, naked, and savage, but vigorous and free—­unadorned indeed, but also untrammeled.  Only a certain proportion of excellence is allowed to our race, but that is granted; and let us stretch it, expand it, roll and beat it out as we will, it is still but the same square inch made thin to cover a greater surface.  For one good we still must yield another; we have no gain that is not loss, no acquisition but surrender, “exchange” which may perhaps be “no robbery,” though quantity does seem a poor substitute for quality in matters of beauty.  I wish I had lived in the times when the ore lay in the ingot (and had been one of the few who owned a nugget), instead of in these times of universal gold-leaf, glitter without weight, and shining shallowness of mere surface.  Vigor is better than refinement, and to create better than to improve, and to conceive better than to combine.  I wonder if the world, or rather the human mind, will ever really grow decrepit, and the fountain of beauty in men’s souls run dry to the dregs; or will the manifestations only change, and the eternal spirit reveal itself in other ways?...

On our way home I had a long and interesting talk with John about the different forms of religious faith into which the gradual development of the human mind has successively expanded; each, of course, being the result of that very development, acting on the original necessity to believe in and worship and obey something higher and better than itself, implanted in our nature.  It seems strange that he has a leaning to Roman Catholicism, which I have not.  Our Protestant profession appears to me the purest creed—­form—­that Christianity has yet arrived at; but, I suppose, a less spiritual one, or perhaps I should say external accompaniments, affecting more palpably the senses and imagination, are wholesome and necessary to the cultivation and preservation of the religious sentiment in some minds.  Catholicism was the faith of the chivalrous times, of the poetical times, of times when the creative faculty of man poured forth in since unknown abundance masterpieces of every kind of beauty, as manifestations of the pious and devout enthusiasm.  Protestantism is undoubtedly the faith of these times; a denying faith, a rejecting creed, a questioning belief, its evil seems essentially to coincide with the worst tendency of the present age, but its good seems to me positive and unconditional, independent of time or circumstance; the best, in that kind, that the believing necessity in our nature has yet attained.  Rightly understood and lived up to, the only service of God which is intellectual freedom, as all His service, lived up to, under