d in
power, and the labor of his art in its felicity.--"E faticoso lo studio
della pittura, et sempre si fa il mare maggiore," said he, who of all
men was least likely to have left us discouraging report of anything
that majesty of intellect could grasp, or continuity of labor
overcome.[1] But that this labor, the necessity of which in all ages has
been most frankly admitted by the greatest men, is justifiable in a
moral point of view, that it is not the pouring out of men's lives upon
the ground, that it has functions of usefulness addressed to the
weightiest of human interests, and that the objects of it have calls
upon us which it is inconsistent alike with our human dignity and our
heavenward duty to disobey--has never been boldly asserted nor fairly
admitted; least of all is it likely to be so in these days of dispatch
and display, where vanity, on the one side, supplies the place of that
love of art which is the only effective patronage, and on the other, of
the incorruptible and earnest pride which no applause, no reprobation,
can blind to its shortcomings nor beguile of its hope.

And yet it is in the expectation of obtaining at least a partial
acknowledgment of this, as a truth influential both of aim and conduct,
that I enter upon the second division of my subject. The time I have
already devoted to the task I should have considered altogether
inordinate, and that which I fear may be yet required for its completion
would have been cause to me of utter discouragement, but that the object
I propose to myself is of no partial nor accidental importance. It is
not now to distinguish between disputed degrees of ability in
individuals, or agreeableness in canvases, it is not now to expose the
ignorance or defend the principles of party or person. It is to summon
the moral energies of the nation to a forgotten duty, to display the
use, force, and function of a great body of neglected sympathies and
desires, and to elevate to its healthy and beneficial operation that art
which, being altogether addressed to them, rises or falls with their
variableness of vigor,--now leading them with Tyrtaean fire, now singing
them to sleep with baby murmurings.

Sec. 3. The doubtful force of the term "utility."

Only as I fear that with many of us the recommendation of our own
favorite pursuits is rooted more in conceit of ourselves, than affection
towards others, so that sometimes in our very pointing of the way, we
had rather t