e universe, and what capacity in children for enjoying them,
especially in our American children, may we not say! The constitution of
Americans is in some respects delicate, and shows great susceptibility
in early life, and capability of aesthetic culture. Our children are
vastly wiser and happier by being taught to distinguish beauty from
tinsel pretence, and to see the difference between the fine and
superfine. The whole land groans in ignorance of this distinction; and
the most extravagant outlay for children and adults is made for dress
and furniture, toys and ornaments, that are an abomination to true
taste. We may begin the reform at the beginning, and apply the ideas of
the truly beautiful in the books and magazines that we put before our
children. We can make Preraphaelites of them of the right kind, by
training their eye, not to love bald scenes and ghostly figures, but to
appreciate natural form, feature, and color, and composition, and so
possess their senses and fancy with the materials and impressions of
loveliness, that, when the constructive reason or the ideal imagination
begins to work, it will work wisely and well, and not only dream fair
visions and speak and write fair words, but carve true shapes, and plan
noble grounds, and rear goodly edifices for dwelling, or for study, art,
humanity, or religion. The child that learns to see the beautiful has
the key of a blessed gate to God's great temple, and can find everywhere
an entrance to the shrine. What a new and higher Puritanism will come,
when we learn to apply pure taste to common affairs, and carry out all
the laws of truth and beauty, as the old saints carried out the letter
of the Bible! The day is coming, and is partly come. Do not many
New-Yorkers look upon the Central Park as being, with its waters and
flowers and music for all, as good a commentary on the Sermon on the
Mount as any in the Astor Library? and does not solid Boston regard its
great organ as a part of that great interpretation of the Divine Mind
which Cotton and Winthrop sought only in the sacred book? Give us a
thirty years' fair training of our children in schools and reading,
galleries and music-halls, gardens and fields, and our America, the
youngest among the great nations, will yield to none the palm of
strength or of beauty; and as she sits the queen, not the captive, in
her noble domain, her children, who have learned grace under her
teaching, shall rise up and call her ble