As those
blessings that are far off and difficult to be attained are usually
those which are most highly prized, we often find persons sighing for
the culture to be obtained from music, painting, and sculpture, and
overlooking or undervaluing the higher culture to be derived from poetry
and romance. The best gifts of Heaven are always those which are most
universal. Let any one read the plays of Shakespeare, the poems of
Milton, and the novels of Scott carefully and critically as he would
study a gallery of pictures, and he will find his taste refined and
elevated as much as it could be by a visit to the Vatican. The genius of
these authors is to the full as high and noble and original as that of
Raphael, Angelo, or Titian. The means of culture are not far-fetched and
dear-bought. They lie around us everywhere, and to make use of them is a
luxurious recreation of the mind. What mother, wearied and worn by the
cares of maternity, what laborer, exhausted with toil, what student,
faint with striving for fame, but would be refreshed and renewed for
the warfare of life by forgetting it all for a little while in the
realms of the ideal world?
The common, vulgar misuse of novel-reading by the silly, the
empty-headed, and the corrupt, should not blind us to its benefits.
There are those who in music, painting, and sculpture find only
nutriment for sensuality and impurity. Shall we, therefore, deny to all,
and banish from the world the refining ministrations of beauty in form
and color and sweet sounds? As justly may we wage war upon the wayside
flowers because the children are now and then tardy at school from
stopping to gather them.
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