re workers, and their work remains.
Again, good work is born of affection. Love teaches more art than all
the schools. What we love, we instinctively beautify. The artist
beautifies the material on which he works. He loves his task, and from
his love there begins a gradual shaping of the ideal. The product gains
a touch of beauty. The needlework of Egypt and Byzantium, the laces of
Venice and of Spain, are historic. It is said of Queen Isabella, that
she was one of the best needleworkers of her age; that "her _motifs_
were the great events of the time."
A peasant girl of Venice was once given a beautiful coral-branch and
some rare leaves and shells which her lover had gathered for her from
the sea-depths. She was untaught in art, and making fish-nets was her
wonted work. Day by day as she wrought her nets, she looked upon the
lovely sea-treasures, their beauty passed into her heart and mind, and
she began to copy, spray by spray, the coral-foliage, the leaves of the
sea-grasses, and the curves of the sea-shells, until after a time, in
the meshes of her fish-nets, she had imprisoned forms of exquisite
beauty, and one saw there reproduced, in dainty and artistic grouping,
what her very soul had loved and fed upon. Her fish-nets became works
of art.
Work of a high order is always based on high ideals and on great
thoughts. It implies a vast amount of toil. The Capellmeister of the
Vatican choir to-day is that wonderful young genius, Perosi, who is
stirring all Europe by the beauty of his musical work, and by the
spirituality and fervor of his musical imagination. He has set himself
to compose twelve oratorios, which shall body forth the whole life of
the Saviour. He believes that the music-lover and the church-lover may
be identical, and has set his hand to the uniting of all true
music-lovers with the great offices and services and influences of the
Church. Here is Work exalted to its spiritual office: to carry out, not
only ideals of beauty and harmony, but to advance spiritual progress.
This is the final aim of all true work: it must be not only aesthetic,
and honest, but spiritual. The prayer of the true workman is ever to
make himself a workman approved unto God. "May the beauty of the Lord be
upon us, and the work of our hands, establish Thou it!"
The worker should have change of work. Nature never intended that a man
should do one thing all his life. This is in harmony neither with man's
infinite capacity, n
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