The Express.
London, England, 1853-07-19 00:00:00

THE CRYSTAL PALACE.

The Crystal Palace at Sydenham begins to cast be-
fore it a very distinct shadow of the magnificence to come.
Those who have availed themselves of the privilege, now
open to all, of inspeet:ng the works on payment of a live
shilling fee, must have been sufficingly impressed with the
thoroughness with which the business is being dote. They
must have felt, if not said to themselves, " This promises to
be, not only the fines• exhibition in the world, but the
finest exhibition possible, at the world's present stage of
progrsos." In magnitudo and variety, the display will

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eertaidy extend to the extreme .verge of the prectteelly

comprehensible. To have seen the old Exhibition
thoroughly, would have required no fraction
of the leisure of a lifetime ; but the Sydenham
1 display will be one which, if numerically more finite,
will yet demand far more time fur its entire comprehension

on account of the vastly greater average interest of the ob-
jects displayed. These objects will be precisely than
which are fitted to be of the best and deepest interest to the
greatest possible number of persons. These of the fine
arts which are capable of being put under contribution for
exhibition will be represented with an extent and com-
pleteness hitherto unknown. Facsimiles of all the noblest
sculptures which ancient and modern time% have produced,
will be assembled in out spot. Architectures—Egyptian.
Greek, Arabic, and Gothic—will not only be represented, but
re-produced, life-sise," in all their more notable forms,
and with practical illustrations of the popular mysteries of
polychromy, hypmthral roofs, honey-comb vaulting, ancient
frescoes and arabesques, &c.; and, furthermore, the main
building itself will be the first and most glorious specimen
of au entirely new style of architecture of singular beauty,
and of great, though, as yet, very imperfectly foreseen
powers of adaptation to our peculiar modern wants. Mr.
Ruskin, who said of the architecture of the old Crystal
Palate, that

The earth has bubbles as the water
And this is of them;

will be found to have committed a memorable blunder ; and
he will doubtlessly be not slow to retract it when he beholds,
from the lovely western valley, the terraced hill blazing
with millions of flowers and jets-d'eau, and crowned with
the lofty trsnrepts, vaulted naves, and soaring towers of the
new cathedral of the arts and sciences. If, in the presence
of so poetical a subject, we may be permitted to express
ourselves by a poetical figure, our old stone and brick
architecture may he said to have died, like Goethe, calling
for " more light," ,and to have arisen, in the present form,
with the full enjoyment of the desidcrated
The art of nature will, be represented side by side and
hand in hand with the art of man, and in the same order

—that is, historically. The marvels of Karndk and Nine-
veh, with their sphinxes self bulbs as big as the Trojan
horse, will be matched with the productions of the " heroic
ages" of nature—the vast mud lake, the dreary shore of
the prw-Achunite isle, with its rank cover of ferns, and its
mighty denizens, the lchthyoeaurus, the Mastodon, the
Plesiosaurus, and the Megatherium, as large as
life, and larger than credible to the modern eye.
The race even of man will be called upon to
render a full account of itself, and the bells of tile
Sydenham Palace will present to our astonished senses
every variety of the posterity of Shem, Ham, and Japhet
frem the " pure Caucasian" to the Beekman, and trom
the giants of Patagonia to the Aztec Lilliputians, together
with the physiology of these personages, we shell be enabled
to contemplate their main attainments or shortcomings in the
useful arts; especially the useful art of war, of which the
implements will no doubt appear to have constituted the
chief staple products of nine varieties out of ten.
After the men among their war-tools, will come the
beasts, birds, and fishes of modern times, s. e., the last six
thousand years or so—with their favourite botany : monkeys
in their real skies climbing up the parasite-bouad columns
of the palace ; bats and vampires clinging to its leafy roof ;
lions and their prey coursing through the shadowy and
everlasting summer of the aisles; dodos and penguins
squatting in appropriate recesses; marvellous molluscs
taking their tranquil ph azure ie crystal tanks ; and fishes
disporting themselves, secure from every danger, unless,
perhaps, that which was contemplated in the famous rhyme
which describes them as sweating and swearing under "the
sun's perpendicular heat."
The winter garden will, of course, put all other winter
gardens in the world to the blush, since the advantages
under which it will be crewed were never yet even dis-
tantly approached ; and the English summer gsrden, out-
side, already shows its intention of surpassing everything
in the way of gardens either in fact or fable, from the
hanging gardens of Babylon to the stately avenues and ter-
rates of Versailles.
pal advantage of the opportunity is to; be taken for
giving a system of illustrations of geology upon the natural
male; Gad, in connection with this department, we are to
have complete exemplifications of the processes of mining,
quarrying, well-sinking, and tunnelling.
Over and above all this, which formed no part of the old
Exhibition, we are to have all that was most significant in
the old Exhibition selected and systematised in the new.
A complete and intelligible collection of "raw pioduce,"
mineral, vegetable, and animal, is to be found under the
same roof with the " Court of inventions," in which
models and working illustrations of all that is most
valuable in human ingenuity will be displayed, together
with the results in objects of necessity, convenience, and
taste. Were we not right in saying that the new Crystal
Palace promises to be the best exhibition at present possi-
ble ? It would certainly be difficult to add any new element
to those now enumerated without danger of diminishing the
total effect by making it collectively too vast to be the
subject of contemplation.
Although there is every reason to suppose, from the pre-
emie appearance of the works, that the Palace will be
sufficiently advanced by next May to be thrown quite open
to the public, it is not to be supposed that the
Exhibition can be perfected by that time. The
Winter-garden and the Departments of Manufacture'
and Zoology will require a long time for their completion;
but whatever may be the incompleteness of the Palace next
May, the public may rest assured that, in general effect, the
display will almost surpass our present conception, and
that, in matter of detail, there will be far more than can
be inspected in one season by any person, with only a
reasonable amount of sight-seeing time on his hands.