ifted individual having, at one time
or another, brought home those moods to them.

Therefore we need feel no surprise if any individual, peasant or man
of business or abstract thinker, reveal a lack, even a total lack, of
such impressions as I am speaking of; nor even if among those who love
art a great proportion be still incapable of identifying those vague
contemplative emotions from which all art is sprung. It is not merely
the special endowment of eye, ear, hand, not merely what we call
artistic talent, which is exceptional and vested in individuals only.
It takes a surplus of sensitiveness and energy to be determined in
one's moods by natural surroundings instead of solely by one's own
wants or circumstances or business. Now art is born of just this
surplus sensitiveness and energy; it is the response not to the
impressions made by our private ways and means, but to the impressions
made by the ways and means of the visible, sensible universe.

But once produced, art is received, and more or less assimilated, by
the rest of mankind, to whom it gives, in greater or less degree, more
of such sensitiveness and energy than it could otherwise have had. Art
thus calls forth contemplative emotions, otherwise dormant, and
creates in the routine and scramble of individual wants and habits a
sanctuary where the soul stops elbowing and trampling, and being
elbowed and trampled; nay, rather, a holy hill, neither ploughed nor
hunted over, a free high place, in which we can see clearly, breathe
widely, and, for awhile, live harmlessly, serenely, fully.

XIII.

Thinking these thoughts for the hundredth time, feeling them in a way
as I feel the landscape, I walk home by the dear rock path girdling
Fiesole, within sound of the chisels of the quarries. Blackthorn is
now mixed in the bare purple hedgerows, and almond blossom, here and
there, whitens the sere oak, and the black rocks above. These are the
heights from which, as tradition has it, Florence descended, the
people of which Dante said--

"Che discese da Fiesole ab antico,
E tiene ancor del monte e del macigno,"

meaning it in anger. But it is true, and truer, in the good sense
also. Mountain and rock! the art of Tuscany is sprung from it, from
its arduous fruitfulness, with the clear stony stream, and the sparse
gentle olive, and the cypress, unshaken by the wind, unscorched by the
sun, and shooting inflexibly upwards.

ART AND USEFULNESS.