The Greek Slave.

Dear Douglass:ーHaving seen that exquisiteーalmost celestialーproduct of Art, the statue of a Greek Slave, by Powers, now exhibiting in this city, will you allow me a corner in your columns in reference thereto?

The Greek Slave! what and whom is thereby intended? Of the original inception, in the artist's mind, little is known; but the result is before us: A statue, the size of life, of a female being, perfect in every lineament and limbーin every line and feature, and almost breathing a prayer for mercy from the beholder, as he gazes upon her semi-angelic countenance, and listens for the clank of the chain and letter seen upon her lovely limbs! Such an expression of heart-riven, imploring innocence and purity, would rob the savegeness from a bear, and tears from the least sensitive of human eyes.

The soul is oppressed in her angelic presence; sensualism leaves the heart at once, if it had intruded there before; and while the eye is delighted with the triumph of a divine art, the living spirit feels abashed and guilt-stricken, that our race had ever become so devilish as to furnish the original for such a copy! Chains! CHAINS! on limbs so human! Tears from such an heavenly eye! and sighs of sorrow and shame from a bosom the purity loveliness and majesty of which, would challenge the admiration of beings of a purer sphere!

MEN become conscious of their own demerit in her presence, and are awed into silence, or whispers, as they drink in the divine effulgenceーthe halo of heavenーin which she seems to swim before the enraptured vision. There idle curiosity yields to self-reproach, and indifference to rapture, as the mind surveys the touching and exquisite creation before it; and the most enlightened feel the promptings of that impulse which impels the less favored of our race to the worship of the works of their own hands. Indeed, is not the feeling with which we view so great a triumph of art, akin to that with which we are overwhelmed when duly contemplating the great Architect of the universe, through HIS works! We worship the creating spiritーthe godlike power, which calls being into existence, and enables the creature, thus perfectly, to imitate the works of the Creator.

But other thoughts clamor for utterance: The GREEK Slave! Innocence, purity and loveliness torn from parental armsーthe embrace of kindnessーthe charms of homeーthe entire joys of existence, and ruthlessly despoiled of robe and vesture, and, manacled and nude, exposed to the inspection and purchase of the semi-brutal barbarian! How perfect the emblems of the divine and the devilishーof the beautiful and the brutish in human nature, are thus presented! Whence those manacles and chains! Selfishness and cruelty desired a slave.ーWhence those tearsーthat unspoken anguishーthat sadness of soul? An angel has been snatched from her sphere, to serve a demon, to suffer for our instruction. Have we a latent sentiment of justice, a tear for suffering innocence, an emotion of pity left? The heart leaps to the rescue, and the arm is outstretched, to avenge. "The divinity within us, is stirred," and ready to combat the sensual and criminal, and assert the supremacy of mind over might, of truth and justice, over wrong and selfishness.

Instead of pandering to the base and sensual in our nature, this beautiful and lovely creature appeals to all the noble and just sentiments of the soul; and learns it to detest that depravity in man, which suggests or tolerates so great a crime, as is manifest in the slave system. In the act of ENCHAINING and degrading to the brute level a being of which this magnificent piece of statuary is but a cold and lifeless resemblance. It makes us pity suffering, hate wrongーand the wrong doer; to love the right, and plead and pray, wrestle and FIGHT if need be, against oppression. While, was that mere emblem of lifeーlife itself, those shrinking limbs, and that lofty brow, warm and glowing with the coursing blood, and the thinking brain, we would sever the ignominious chain, and clasp the suffering victim to our bosom, in spite of measureless peril, how doubly odious and execrable the monster who should stand by, and under any retence of law, compact, or religion, claim PROPERTY in such a being! That indignation would be holy indeed, which could be appeased only by the instant banishment of so great an enemy of virtue, to regions beyond the ken of hope, and where no ear could ever hear its unanswered prayer. This is the thought natural to the circumstances; the feeling indigenous to the unsophisticated heart. We pity and love the poor outraged GREEK slave-girl; and while we pity and love her all the more for her chains, Oh! how heart and brain burn with hatred of the cruel TURK who does thus violate the sacred rights of human nature; and place his own diabolical SELF between GOD and his creature. And to the feeling heart and discerning eye, all slave girls are GREEK, and all slave mungers TURKS, wicked cruel and hateful; be their names HASSAM, SELIM, JAMES, JUDAS, or HENRY; their country Algiers or Alabama; Congo or Carolina, the same. The lesson learned at the feet of this great creation of thought, is of no country nor color, and has its boundaries on the one hand in heaven where, justice and mercy are met; and on the other, by that dark chaos, where all order is lost, and love gives place to the wranglings and hatred born of an unlicensed selfishness. The mind, coming in contact with so vivid and unmistakable an appeal to its moral sense, unaffected, can never have felt the promptings of conscience, and appreciates too little of justice, to be a safe commoner in a world of mutual rights and interests. It lacks a great essential of human nature; and should be placed in a school of morals at once, or forever abandoned as too idiotic for permanent reclamation.

In this effort of the artist, we see more than mere art. It is the embodiment of a GODLIKE idea; a world's history considered, a whole decalogue at a glance, written so plain that the unlettered and simple may read; a retouching by a hand divine, of the tablets delivered by God himself to a mortal on Mount Sinai; all the "Thou shalt nots" of the great JEHOVAH are traced in lines of light on the beatific yet sorrowing and lovely features of this beneficent gift of genius to man. He who hath wronged his fellowーor stifled the monitor within his own bosom, is confronted here by a conscienceーan exterior reproach, that he cannot withstand. Its voice is, "I am wronged by my brother man; witness these chains! Decide ye now; hath justice your sympathiesーor go you with the oppressor to do violence?" Cover our crime as we willーshoulder it off, as a social or political evil, distort God's word, or Providence in palliation, as we may; still then isthe fact; Innocence and lovelinessーa human soul in chains; our sister with all her affections aspirations and high capacities, sold to the beastial TURK, whoever he may be, and he designs to cast her down from her god-given estate, into the dominion of things. To that conclusion we come at least, inevitably, and always; choose we must the divine or the divilish. There is no retreat. If we stifle pity, and mock at calamity, we are damned. There is nothing of us to save; and a world of such beings would soon find a devil at its head, and itself legitimately annexed to regions long since appropriately named. While there is a well, and an ill, in words, this must be so; no sophistry can evade it; no circumstances change the fact; no combination or division of men, politically or otherwise, transform virtue to vice, nor paint the deformity of hell, into a thing loveable. Nature revolts at wrong.ーWe feel it, and know it untaught. Hence the eloquence of this voiceless marble. Its teachings are resistless; and had Congress appropriated ten millions of dollars to buy this silent moral mentor, and given it a place in the halls where so much crime has been legalized and connived at, ours would have been a wiser and a better nation.

Then no more territory would have been polluted by the footprint of the fiend; no money appropriated under any guise, for the purchase of those who were entrusted with the people's rights; no mockery of law, making it penal to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or relieve the oppressed; no fettered Chaplins, nor fleeing bondsman; no degraded statesman, nor muzzled presses; nor, a whole people seeking some new way to escape the ignominy and shame attendant on their wide departure from that path to which this beautiful and divine creature of the artist, ever invite us with her manacled arm and sorrowing eye.

S. F.

W. Bloomfield, Sept. 25th 1850.