s we love to see the
manifestation of growth. We tend and cherish the little plant in the
window; we watch with delight the unfolding of each new leaf and
the upward reach into blossom. The spring, bursting triumphant
from the silent, winter-stricken earth, is nature's parable of
expression, her symbol perennially renewed of the joy of growth.

The impulse to expression is cosmic and eternal. But even in the
homeliness and familiarity of our life from day to day the need of
expression is there, whether we are entirely aware of it or not; and
we are seeking the realization and fulfillment of ourselves through
the utterance of what we are. A few find their expression in forms
which with distinct limitation of the term we call works of art. Most
men find it in their daily occupations, their profession or their
business. The president of one of the great Western railroads
remarked once in conversation that he would rather build a thousand
miles of railroad than live in the most sumptuous palace on Fifth
Avenue. Railroad building was his medium of expression; it was his
art. Some express themselves in shaping their material environment,
in the decoration and ordering of their houses. A young woman said,
"My ambition is to keep my house well." Again, for her,
housekeeping is her art. Some find the realization of themselves in
the friends they draw around them. Love is but the utterance of what
we essentially are; and the response to it in the loved one makes the
utterance articulate and complete. Expression rises out of our
deepest need, and the need impels expression.

The assertion that art is thus involved with need seems for the
moment to run counter to the usual conception, which regards art as
a product of leisure, a luxury, and the result not of labor but of play.
Art in its higher forms becomes more and more purely the
expression of emotion, the un-trammeled record of the artist's
spiritual experience. It is only when physical necessities have been
met or ignored that the spirit of man has free range. But the maker
who adds decoration to his bowl after he has moulded it is just as
truly fulfilling a need--the need of self-expression--as he fulfilled a
need when he fashioned the bowl in the first instance in order that he
might slake his thirst. Art is not superadded to life,--something
different in kind. All through its ascent from its rudimentary forms
to its highest, from hut to cathedral, art is coordinate with t