Imagination is the marriage of Thought and Affection, and the Fine Arts
are its first-born children, and represent humanity in all its phases
more fully and truly than any other department of art or science. What
we know as the useful arts, which are born of man's love for physical
ease and pleasure, are of comparatively modern date; but history
goes not back to the time when the mind of man first took delight in
fashioning and admiring the products of the fine arts. Many suppose them
God-given and coeval with the birth of man. Music, painting, sculpture,
poetry, and romance are the five departments of the fine arts. When
these are studied and loved merely for amusement, they are of little or
no use; if they are made vehicles for filling the mind with impure and
evil images, they are shocking abuses; but if they subserve pure and
holy purposes, elevating the soul towards all that is beautiful and
good, they are true Apostles of the Word. Their ministrations are almost
if not quite universal. It would be hard to find a human being whose
soul is not stirred by one or other of them.
Comparatively few persons have it in their power to enjoy the delight
and the refining influence that are derived from the highest exhibitions
of skill in those departments of the fine arts that address themselves
to the eye and the ear; but poetry and romance, the most intellectual
and the most varied of them all, are accessible to every one.
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