observation. Soon, however, his look grew kindly and genial, (not that
it had ever been in the least degree repulsive, but only reserved,) and
Leutze allowed us to gaze at the cartoon of his great fresco, and
talked about it unaffectedly, as only a man of true genius can speak
of his own works. Meanwhile the noble design spoke for itself upon the
wall. A sketch in color, which we saw afterwards, helped us to form
some distant and flickering notion of what the picture will be, a few
months hence, when these bare outlines, already so rich in thought and
suggestiveness, shall glow with a fire of their own,--a fire which, I
truly believe, will consume every other pictorial decoration of the
Capitol, or, at least, will compel us to banish those stiff and
respectable productions to some less conspicuous gallery. 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