John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[506] the older scholars did, a new field of surer progress to knowledge has been opened before us, and the ancient porcelains of assured provenance have now an importance they did not possess before. For this reason I was, in my narrow way, quite carried away by my researches in New York; and I am persuaded that Mr. Dana must have had a most profound instinct in relation to the whole subject. Otherwise, how could he have sought, with such method and persistency, to acquire objects with which the ordinary amateur of porcelain does not concern himself at all, but which, from the scholar's point of view, are the most interesting objects there are? The whole range of the celadon that he gathered leaves no room to doubt the soundness of his belief. In all the other collections that I have seen, it is not so wide. So that I hold that if one would learn Martabani, and it is the foundation of the whole history of porcelain, he must go to New York.

And it is not alone in respect of celadon that this is true Grandidier points with pardonable exultation to his clair de lunes, his gray and blue Sung bowls and jars. He has never seen Mr. Dana's.

And here it may be said that the owner loved to play with these beautiful things, to rearrange them, to make new combinations and color schemes, and to discover new beauties and unsuspected harmonies, as a happy child loves to play with flowers; and no person could see him in the bright morning light handling and caressing his treasures without becoming interested in them as well as in their fascinated owner, or leave them without the conviction that his love for them was as simple and unaffected as it was deep and abiding. The collection, numbering something over four hundred pieces, large and small, was sold after his death for nearly two hundred thousand dollars. The sale attracted the connoisseurs from all parts of the country, and, as they represented collectors from nearly all parts of the world, the bidding and the prices paid made the event a genuine sensation. No collection