ART AMONG US.

I ONCE met with a naturalist who made the study of Botany his speciality. He was an indefatigable collector, and had gathered several thousand specimens, preserving them with great care. They were all accurately named and classified. He had written papers on the various species of some genus of unpronounceable name; had investigated the medicinal properties of nutritive plants, and altogether was regarded by his associates as a learned man. I happened to call on him one day just as he had returned from a mountain walk, laden with the rich spoils of a laborious search. His flora unstrapped, he eagerly displayed to me bis treasures. There were rhododendrons, and columbines, and violets, and anemones, and all the rich offerings of a bounteous spring. I stood before them in delight. "What a brilliant pink!" I exclaimed, lifting the rhododendron from the rest. "That's the rhododendron maximum," he said, "it will do for exchange with Prof. I have one already in my herbarium." Proud of his collection, he took from its place a large portfolio, and opening it, showed me what he called the counterpart of the flower I had just been admiring. There it lay with all its beauty pressed out, withered, skeleton, colorless! I placed it beside the freshly plucked flower. My friend did not appear to notice the contrast. I directed his attention to it. "Yes," said he, "when I first began to make collections, I was pleased with the different hues and the exquisite arrangement of the leaves, but I very soon lost sight of any such minor considerations in view of the systematic classification of my different specimens." A close attention to the science of Botany had made him well acquainted with the laws of the vegetable kingdom, and had finally developed his faculty of observation and generalization, but his æsthetic nature was withered.

My friend is simply the type of a class. In this College of ours the class is numbered by excluding-there are few who do not belong to it. The education which they seek and which is afforded them, is the dried

specimen; a walk in the open air of nature would show them the living, glorious flower. What I ask is, that we should not press the life out of the flower, and hold up the result as the only good which can be offered. The value of art as an element of education is acknowledged, but seldom reduced to practical working. How is it possible that we should so have lost sight of its power? Chiefly because of the wrong conception which we have formed of its mission-a conception naturally resulting from our limited acquaintance with it. We have little in this country of the thing art; but the name has been wrested from its proper signification, and fastened for the most part on upholstery work. Hence, art has been regarded as nothing more than an expensive luxury; its sole object the adorning of rich men's houses; and its educative influence, if any be allowed it, is confined to the very narrow limit of cultivating a fashionable taste. Others, making a step in advance, regard its mission to be merely the securing of a polish of refinement upon a substantial education. Thus in our educational courses wherever it has been introduced, it has held the place of an expensive ornament; and so in all catalogues of Young Ladies' Institutes, painting is set down among the ornamental branches. While it occupies this position in education it will fail of working out its proper results; but only acknowledge its rightful sphere, and we then shall begin to reap a rich harvest of mental and moral good.

For the proper place of art in education is not supplementary to what are called the solid branches. So long as there are faculties of our nature which are capable, when developed, of ministering to the happiness and virtue of the individual, we are bound to consider them and give them full opportunity for obtaining their ends. That what is called the aesthetic part of our nature is capable of being educated as well as the mental, moral or physical, none will deny. That it is thus educated who will assert? Only when thus cared for can its full power of usefulness be seen and felt. The emotions which possess the soul of a susceptible nature, when gazing upon a truly religious representation on the canvass, are of no ordinary character, and rightly directed have that tendency to elevate and purify which it were wrong to disregard. If art in the hands of men who abuse its means and turn it aside from its proper channel is so disastrous a corrupter of morals, what good may we not expect from those manifestations of art which emanate from religious natures?

I will not inquire into the exact proportion of attention which should be bestowed on art as an element of education, but, assuming that its present position is insufficient for the full exercise of its influence, shall

endeavor to show how it may be made more conspicuous and have a wider field of usefulness. Neither do I desire to discuss the value of professorships or lectureship on art, nor to insist that text-book instruction upon the subject should be incorporated in a course of collegiate education. That is a step which is the final one to be taken, and not at all initiatory. To pursue such a course would be as foolish as to educate a naturalist in a city library, and allow him no flowers to analyze, no butterflies to examine, nor minerals to handle. The first step, surely, must be to surround ourselves with examples that shall draw out our æsthetic faculties to familiarize ourselves with shapes and colors of truth and beauty.

And here I am met with the remark—that such examples are already about us-that no color can equal the flush of the sunset sky, or the hues of the autumn leaf-that no forms can equal in beauty the graceful forest trees or rough mountain crags. True; and a right study of our mountain scenery and natural beauty, would do more to cultivate the æsthetic nature than all the galleries of art in Europe. But nature is not so studied here; we hardly lift our eyes to look upon the glories of God's universe, and seem contented, even in the joy of an opening spring, to bask in the warm sunshine, and enjoy rather the animal pleasures of indolence and sleep, than fill our mind and senses with the wonderful representations of beauty and grace. It is because the study of art will lead us to appreciate and enjoy nature more, that I would urge attention to it. Indeed, the influence is reciprocal, and although sometimes disproportionately large on one side or the other, yet still leading the student of the one better to love and appreciate the other. This is no degrading mission of art. The art which will lead us to nature is ennobling and spiritual.

The first step then would be to surround ourselves with examples of noble art, in painting, in sculpture and in architecture. In painting. Let us begin at the student's room. He is necessarily confined here for the most part to engravings; yet these, unsatisfactory as they are in comparison with original works, have no mean influence. If he would only use this influence as it might be used, he would take an important step in his education. It is unfortunate that we have no opportunities here for obtaining good engravings. The only articles offered for sale are a few simpering female faces in French Lithography; a photograph of "The Florida Expedition," and steel engravings of officers of the College. These, with a sprinkling of photographs of recent graduates, make up the collection met with in a student's room. The collection is occasionally

varied by "Williamstown taken from Stone Hill," or desultory views of college buildings taken from other situations, and equally uncomplimentary.

Here and there you shall find a good line engraving, but very seldom in the same room with most of the above.

In the rooms of a few students-may they never be blessed with engravings of their own-a diligent reader of the Library books will find tacked upon the walls, some of those frontispieces, vignettes and illustrations, which he has never been able to discover in their proper places. Some students leave examples of their art in the books which they draw from the libraries. Others, so far from adding to the illustrations of the books, take away even those which they have.

These pictures, redolent with the smoke of generations, and disfigured with the fly-specks of a long series of years, are looked upon with little interest and hold no place in the affections. Their purpose is to variegate what would otherwise be a dull expanse of oak paper, and to furnish subjects for comment and scandal. Most of their owners grudge them the luxury of frame and glass, leaving them to exposure to the dust, smoke and flies. Indeed, it is encouraging to think that the owners do care so little for them-so little in fact, that the senior at commencement, is sure to look about for some grateful survivor upon whom to bestow his sadly begrimed beauties; and so they continue to be handed down from one generation to another, fulfilling their mission of being perpetual disfigurators of college walls.

I wish that the influence of such pictures were merely negative; but I fear that it is not so, and that they have a tendency to lower the standard not of taste only, but of morality. The possessor of a college room thus adorned, receives both direct and indirect evil. By a certain class of the collection described, suggestions are imparted which corrupt his nature, and by almost all the nicety of his discriminating faculties, is blunted, and, unable to discern between the beautiful and the gross, he gradually loses in part his power to discern between the true and the false, between right and wrong. Indirectly they injure him by affording no restraining power to wean him to quiet reflection and the cultivation of scholarly habits. On the other hand, consider the elevating tendency of good art. Suppose the student in his room to be surrounded with his books and good pictures. He will enter his room each time with pleasurable emotions. The articles of taste always about him, will creep into a quiet corner of his heart, and form a strong influence to guard him from the corruption of low and sensual enjoyment. When freed from

the labors of the day, he sits listlessly in his arm chair, his eye will have only objects of taste on which to rest-purer thoughts and emotions will be suggested to his mind, and his heart will be refined by immediate contact with excellency and virtue. When he leaves College walls, the choicest treasures which he carries away will be his pictures, and in after life he will find memories associated with them that will bless him with a joy that knows no cessation but constant increase. And this is no ideal state of things. The consciousness of a single individual who has exposed himself to such an influence, testifies to its truth. Neither is it a thing which is impossible of general realization. A movement in this direction among a few only, would awaken to a sense of its value the mass of College students. If a tithe of the money which is squandered here on abuses of appetite, were applied to such a purpose, our College rooms would be centres of refinement.

But much as the student in his own room may do toward cultivating a love for art and enjoying its blessings, he is yet debarred from the highest good which can be gained from such an influence. For he is obliged to rest contented with engravings, and cannot have the opportunity to stand face to face with the living works of artists and read on the canvass the great conceptions of its author. The warm life of the picture is lost in its passage through the engraver's hand-not wholly lost, it is true, else we never could feel a spark of enthusiasm or emotion when witnessing it, but yet so chilled and repressed that the most of its eloquence is gone. These examples of art, if he is to enjoy them at all, must be procured for him, and placed within his reach by others. The agency for this may be twofold.

It may be that of the Institution. In his philosophical studies, the collegian may possess some of the simplest of all apparatus for illustration, may furnish himself with prisms and horse-shoe magnets, but he must depend upon the college for the electrical machine and air-pump. Not more necessary for studies in Philosophy and Natural History are the apparatus and cabinet, than is a gallery of paintings for a proper study of art; and if, as I truly think, the study of art is a necessary element of education, such a gallery is owing to the student, (so far as the college owes him anything) as fairly in kind, though not perhaps in degree, as the illustration for natural science and history. Such a gallery is not made up of five or six oil portraits of former Presidents or Vice Presidents of the College. These are interesting as historical remembrancers and valuable as such works always are; but what we want is a