THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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bodies the universal desire to keep some sort of foothold on this transient existence, to leave a something that will at any rate testify to the fact that such a personage once really lived and labored, or to secure this kind of remembrance for one’s beloved. Occasionally one touch of nature will do this.

In the cloisters of Westminster Abbey there is an unremarkable stone; cut on this stone in old characters is a very short inscription, “Jane Lyster—deare Childe.” Nothing more. Yet every traveler goes to see this simplest of gravestones, and if he, or more particularly she, has any imagination or human feeling at all she will understand all that was left unsaid those many years ago. I think this inscription touches the high­est point of suggestiveness in art, the what to leave undone is well-nigh as important as the what to do.

Those extraordinarily accomplished artists, the Japanese, have long grasped this fact, and, I believe, more than one treatise exists on how much can be or should be expressed by a single line as the very climax of the art of representation or sugges­tion.

I have attempted to give very concisely some notions of what must always be somewhat vague, the beginning of art. You will be able to form your own estimate of what it was, how arrived at, from the examples from all countries gathered together in this magnificent Exposition. You will find admirable specimens of the primitive attempts at ornamental art in the Smithsonian loan collection exhibit down-stairs, “Arts of Women in Savagery.” Some of them are perfectly classical in form, funda­mentally identical with the ancient relics of Etruria. All these will well repay a care­ful study. The pictures and statuary from the various countries I need scarcely recom­mend to your attention; the galleries that contain them are here as everywhere the great center of attraction.