Speak as some men may, faithlessly, concerning religion, where is the man who would not feel safer should he know that the engineer and conductor of his train were Christians? men not only caring for others, but themselves especially cared for.

Frederick von Schluembach, of noble birth, an officer in the Prussian army, was a leader there in infidelity and dissipation to such a degree as to drive him to this country at the time of our Civil War. He went into service and attained to the rank of captain. His conversion was remarkable and he brought to his Saviour's service all the intense earnestness and zeal that he had been giving to Satan. He joined the Methodists and became a minister among them. His heart went out to the multitudes of his countrymen here, and especially to the young; thus he came in contact with the central committee and was employed by them to visit German centres. This was in 1871, in Baltimore, where took place the first meeting of the national bund of German-speaking associations. At their request Mr. Von Schluembach took the field, which has resulted, after extreme opposition on the part of the German churches, in eight German Young Men's Christian Associations, besides an equal number of German committees in associations. When we remember that there are more than two million Germans in this country, and that New York is the fourth German city in the world, we can scarcely overestimate the greatness of this work. Mr. Von Schluembach was obliged on account of ill health to go to Germany for a while, and, recovering, formed associations there, - the one in Berlin being especially powerful, some of "Cæsar's household" holding official

VOL. I.-No. VI.-C.

positions in it. He has now returned, and with Claus Olandt, Jr., is again at work among his countrymen. His first work on returning was to assist in raising fifty thousand dollars for the German building in New York City.

Mr. Henry E. Brown has always since the war been intensely interested in the colored men of the South. Shortly after graduation at Oberlin College, Ohio, he founded, and was for two years president of, a college for colored men in Alabama. He is now secretary for the committee among this class at the South, and speaks most encouragingly of the future of this work.

In 1877, there was graduated a young man named L. D. Wishard, from Princeton College. To him seems to have been given a great desire for an inter-collegiate religious work. He, with his companions, issued a call to collegians to meet at the general convention of Young Men's Christian Associations at Louisville. Twenty-two colleges responded and sent delegates. Mr. Wishard was appointed international secretary. One hundred and seventy-five associations have now been formed, with nearly ten thousand members. These colleges report about ninety Bible-classes during the past year. Fifteen hundred students have professed conversion through the association; of these forty have decided to enter the ministry, and two of these are going to the foreign fields.

The work is among the men most likely to occupy the highest position in the country, hence its importance is very great. Mr. Wishard is quite overtaxed and help has been given him at times, but he needs, and so also does the railroad work, an assistant secretary.

There is a class of men in our

abroad. It formed the Christian Commission, which not only relieved the wants of the body during our war, but sent hundreds of Christ's missionaries to the hospitals and battle-fields. It has gloriously manifested the unity of Christ's true church. It stands to-day an organic body, instinct with one life,

enables it to present an unbroken front to superstition and infidelity, which already rear their brazen heads against Christ and his church, and will soon be in open rebellion and actual warfare, and which Christ at his coming will forever destroy.

[NOTE. Through the kindness of Messrs. Harper

the two portraits in this article. For the cuts of the buildings we are indebted to the Chicago Watchman,

THE death of George Fuller has removed a strong and original figure from the activity of American art, and added a weighty name to its history. To speak of him now, while his work is fresh in the public mind, is a labor of some peril; so easy is it, when the sense of loss is keen, to make mistakes in judgment, and to allow the friendly spirit to prevail over the judicial, in an estimation of him as a man and a painter. Yet he has gone in and out before us long enough to make a study of him profitable, and to give us, even now, some occasion for an opinion as to the place he is likely to occupy in the annals of our native art. Mr. Fuller held a peculiar position in American painting, and one which seems likely to remain hereafter unfilled. He followed no one, and had no followers; his art was the outgrowth of personal temperament and experience, rather than the result of teaching, and although he studied others, he was himself his only master. In other men whose names are prominent in our art, we seem to see the direction of an outside influence. Stuart and Copley con

fessed to the teaching of the English school of their day - a school brilliant but formal, and holding close guidingreins over its disciples; Benjamin West became denationalized, so far as his art was concerned; Allston showed the impression of England, Italy, and Flanders, all at once, in his refined and thoughtful style, and Hunt manifested in every stroke of his brilliant brush the learned and facile methods that are in vogue in the leading ateliers of modern Paris. In these men, and in the followers whom their preeminent ability drew after them, we perceive the dominant impulse to be of alien origin; Fuller alone, of all the great ones in our art, was in thought and action purely and simply American. The influence that led others into the error of imitation, seems to have been exerted unavailingly upon his selfreliant mind. We shall search vainly if we look elsewhere than within himself for the suggestions upon which his art was established. Superficial resemblances to other painters are sometimes to be noted in his works, but in governing principle and habit of thought he was serenely and grandly alone.

We must regard him thus if we would study him understandingly, and gain from our observation a correct estimate of his power. We think of our other painters as in the crowd, and amid the affairs of men, and detect in their art a certain uneasiness which the bustle about them necessarily caused. We perceive this most in Hunt, who was emphatically a man of the world, and in Stuart, who shows in some of his later work that his position as the court painter of America, while it aided his purse and reputation, harmed his repose; least in Allston, whose tastes were literary, whose love was in retirement, and who would have been a poet had not circumstances first placed a brush and palette in his hands. Allston, however, enjoyed popularity, and was courted by the best society of his time, and was not permitted, although he doubtless longed for it, to indulge to its full extent his chaste and dreamy fancy. It may be said without disrespect to his undoubted powers, that he would have been less esteemed in his own day if his art had not been largely conventional, and thus easily understood by those who had studied the accepted masters of painting. He lacked positive force of idea, as his works clearly show, that quality which was among the most characteristic traits of Fuller's method, and made him at once the greatest genius, and the man han most misunderstood, among contemporary American painters.

Although men who have not had "advantages" in life are naturally prone to regret their deprivation, they frequently owe their success to this seeming bar against opportunity. We have often seen illustrated in our art the fact that favorable circumstances do not necessarily insure success, and now from

the life of Fuller we gain the still more important truth, that power is never so well aroused as in the face of obstacles. Few men endured more for art than he ; none have waited more uncomplainingly for a recognition that was sure to come by-and-by, or received with greater serenity the approbation which the dull world came at last to bestow. His history is most wholesome in its record of steadfast resting upon conviction, and teaches quite as strongly as his pictures do, the value of absorption in a lofty idea.

If the saying that those nations are the happiest that have no history is true of men, Mr. Fuller's life must be regarded as exceptionally fortunate. Considered by itself, it was quiet and uneventful, and had little to excite general interest; but when viewed in its relation to the practice of his art, it is found to be full of eloquent suggestions to all who, like him, have been appointed to win success through suffering. The narrative of his experience comprises two great periods - the preparation, which covered thirty-four years, and the achievement, to the enjoyment of which less than eight years were permitted. The first period is subdivided into two, of which one embraces eighteen years, from the time when, at the age of twenty, he entered upon the study of his art, to his retirement from the world to the exile of his Deerfield farm; the other including sixteen years of seclusion, until, at the age of fifty-four, he came forth again to proclaim a new revelation. The first part of his career may be dismissed without any extended consideration. Its record consists of an almost unrelieved account of struggle, indifferent success, and lack of appreciation and encouragement, in the cities of Boston

and New York. In Boston he appeared as the student, rather than the producer of works, and laid the foundation of his style in observation of the paintings of Stuart, Copley, Allston, and Alexander,—all excellent models upon which to base a practice, although destined to show little of their influence upon the pictures which he painted in the maturity of his power. It is not to be doubted, however, that all these men, and particularly Stuart, made an impression upon him which he was never afterward wholly able to conceal. We may see even in some of his latest works, under his own peculiar manner, suggestions of Stuart, particularly in portraits of women, which in pose and expression, and to a considerable degree in color, show much of that dignity and composure which so distinguish the female heads of our greatest portrait-painter. He always admired Stuart, and in his later years spoke much of him, with strong appreciation for his skill in describing character, and the refined taste which is such a marked feature of his best

manner.

His work in Boston made no particular impression upon the public mind, and after five years' trial of it he removed to New York, where he joined that brilliant circle of painters and sculptors which, with its followers, has made one of the strongest impressions, if not the most valuable or permanent, upon the art of America. During his residence in that city he devoted himself almost exclusively to portrait-painting, in which he developed a manner more distinguished for conventional excellence than any particular individuality. It was remarked of him, however, that he was disposed, even at this time, to seek to present the thought

and disposition of his subjects more strongly than their merely physical features, and among his principal associates excited no little appreciative comment upon this tendency. In some of his portraits of women of that period, wherein he evidently attempted to present the superior fineness and sensibility of the feminine nature, this effort toward ideality is quite strongly indicated; they are painted with a more hesitating and lingering touch than his portraits of men, and with a certain seeming lack of confidence, which throws about them a thin fold of that veil of etherialism and mystery which so enwraps nearly all his pictures of the last eight years. This treatment, however, seems to have been at that time more the result of experiment than conviction; later in life he wrought its suggestions into a system, the principles of which we may study further on. His earlier work, as has been said, was chiefly confined to portrait-painting, although it is a significant fact that among his pictures of that time are two which show that the feeling for poetical and imaginative effort was working in him. At a comparatively early age he painted an impression of Coleridge's Genevieve, which showed marked evidence of power, and later, after seeing a picture of the school of Rubens, which was owned by one of his artist friends, produced a study which. he afterward seems to have developed into his well-known Boy and Bird; a Cupid-like figure, holding a bird closely against its breast. These exercises, however, seem to have been, as it were, accidental, and had little or no effect in leading him to the practice in which he afterward became absorbed.

His life in New York, which was