accomplishments! What is the use of
drawing, for it ends in a worthless sketch? Why should we study music
when after wasting a thousand hours the amateur cannot satisfy the ear?
A _quoi bon_ modern languages when the accomplishment only enables us to
call a waiter in French or German who is sure to answer us in English?
And what, when it is not your trade, can be the good of dissecting
animals or plants?

To all questionings of this kind there is but one reply. We work for
culture. We work to enlarge the intelligence, and to make it a better
and more effective instrument. This is our main purpose; but it may be
added that even for our special labors it is always difficult to say
beforehand exactly what will turn out in the end to be most useful.
What, in appearance, can be more entirely outside the work of a
landscape painter than the study of ancient history? and yet I can show
you how an interest in ancient history might indirectly be of great
service to a landscape painter. It would make him profoundly feel the
human associations of many localities which to an ignorant man would be
devoid of interest or meaning; and this human interest in the scenes
where great events have taken place, or which have been distinguished by
the habitation of illustrious men in other ages, is in fact one of the
great fundamental motives of landscape painting. It has been very much
questioned, especially by foreign critics, whether the interest in
botany which is taken by some of the more cultivated English landscape
painters is not for them a false direction and wrong employment of the
mind; but a landscape painter may feel his interest in vegetation
infinitely increased by the accurate knowledge of its laws, and such an
increase of interest would make him work more zealously, and with less
danger of weariness and _ennui_, besides being a very useful help to the
memory in retaining the authentic vegetable forms. It may seem more
difficult to show the possible utility of a study apparently so entirely
outside of other studies as music is: and yet music has an important
influence on the whole of our emotional nature, and indirectly upon
expression of all kinds. He who has once learned the self-control of the
musician, the use of _piano_ and _forte_, each in its right place, when
to be lightly swift or majestically slow, and especially how to keep to
the key once chosen till the right time has come for changing it; he who
has once learned