spirers, these people who bring out all that is
best and most attractive in every place, every situation and condition!

There is no accomplishment, no trait of character, no quality of mind,
which will give greater satisfaction and pleasure or contribute more to
one's welfare than an appreciation of the beautiful. How many people
might be saved from wrong-doing, even from lives of crime, by the
cultivation of the esthetic faculties in their childhood! A love of
the truly beautiful would save children from things which encoarsen and
brutalize their natures. It would shield them from a multitude of
temptations.

Parents do not take sufficient pains to develop the love and
appreciation of beauty in their children. They do not realize that in
impressionable youth, everything about the home, even the pictures, the
paper on the wall, affect the growing character. They should never
lose an opportunity of letting their boys and girls see beautiful works
of art, hear beautiful music; they should make a practise of reading to
them or having them read very often some lofty poem, or inspirational
passages from some great writer, that will fill their minds with
thoughts of beauty, open their souls to the inflow of the Divine Mind,
the Divine Love which encompasses us round about. The influences that
moved our youth determine the character, the success and happiness of
our whole lives.

Every soul is born responsive to the beautiful, but this instinctive
love of beauty must be fostered through the eye and the mind must be
cultivated, or it will die. The craving for beauty is as strong in a
child of the slums as in a favorite of fortune. "The physical hunger
of the poor, the yearning of their stomachs," says Jacob A. Riis, "is
not half so bitter, or so little likely to be satisfied as their
esthetic hunger, their starving for the beautiful."

Mr. Riis has often tried to take flowers from his Long Island home to
the "poors" in Mulberry Street, New York. "But they never got there,"
he says. "Before I had gone half a block from the ferry I was held up
by a shrieky mob of children who cried for the posies and would not let
me go another step till I had given them one. And when they got it
they ran, shielding the flower with the most jealous care, to some
place where they could hide and gloat over their treasure. They came
dragging big, fat babies and little weazened ones that they might get a
share, and the babies' eyes g