nce by heart,--the
twenty-seven lines of the Fourth Pythian, which describe the plowing of
Jason. There is nothing grander extant in human fancy, nor set down in
human words: but this great mythical expression of the conquest of the
earth-clay and brute-force by vital human energy, will become yet more
interesting to you when you reflect what enchantment has been cut, on
whiter clay, by the tracing of finer furrows;--what the delicate and
consummate arts of man have done by the plowing of marble, and granite,
and iron. You will learn daily more and more, as you advance in actual
practice, how the primary manual art of engraving, in the steadiness,
clearness, and irrevocableness of it, is the best art-discipline that
can be given either to mind or hand;[36] you will recognize one law of
right, pronouncing itself in the well-resolved work of every age; you
will see the firmly traced and irrevocable incision determining, not
only the forms, but, in great part, the moral temper, of all vitally
progressive art; you will trace the same principle and power in the
furrows which the oblique sun shows on the granite of his own Egyptian
city,--in the white scratch of the stylus through the color on a Greek
vase--in the first delineation, on the wet wall, of the groups of an
Italian fresco; in the unerring and unalterable touch of the great
engraver of Nuremberg,--and in the deep-driven and deep-bitten ravines
of metal by which Turner closed, in embossed limits, the shadows of the
Liber Studiorum.

Learn, therefore, in its full extent, the force of the great Greek word
[Greek: charasso];--and give me pardon, if you think pardon needed, that
I ask you also to learn the full meaning of the English word derived
from it. Here, at the Ford of the Oxen of Jason, are other furrows to be
driven than these in the marble of Pentelicus. The fruitfulest, or the
fatalest, of all plowing is that by the thoughts of your youth, on the
white field of its Imagination. For by these, either down to the
disturbed spirit, "[Greek: kekoptai kai charassetai pedon];" or around
the quiet spirit, and on all the laws of conduct that hold it, as a fair
vase its frankincense, are ordained the pure colors, and engraved the
just characters, of AEonian life.

FOOTNOTES:

[29] Nothing is more wonderful, or more disgraceful, among the forms of
ignorance engendered by modern vulgar occupations in pursuit of gain,
than the unconsciousness, now total, that fine art