these rich treasures of church and convent and gallery, make up the Florence of power-power displayed in the loves and hates a half-a-thousand years agone. Indeed, if all these treasures of the Florentine past were to perish save one alone "Though the many lights dwindle to one light, if only a single picture in a single art gallery remained, it would still tell us (if that picture were the “Primavera " of Botticelli) what it was that informed this strange city of the past, and made poem, palace, dome, tower, gate, cell, fagot, angel, Madonna, and Tribuna the things they were and are. On a westward wall of the Academy of Fine Arts, one of the lesser galleries of prodigal Florence, hangs what the guide-books call an "allegorical representation of Spring; on the left Mercury and the Graces, Venus in the middle, and on the right Flora, with a personification of Fertility and a god of wind.” Possibly so; perhaps, as others think, an allegory of the four seasons; but surely the first great picture in which there was the unmistakable and perennial glory of pure imagination, amid the conventional mythology or hagiology of the time. With this picture before him one exclaims with Dante: Incipit vita nova; here indeed is an epitome of the Renaissance, as Florence is an epitome of the mediæval world. Life, after all, these lovely figures seem to say, is a poor and cruel thing without beauty of doing and of being; nor can beauty really be, without the heart that makes-the sentiment that shapes and consecrates. And the poet or the painter in our age, as in Botticelli's, is he who puts these lessons of the beautiful before the ears and eyes of man. "We usually," says Ruskin, " fall into much error by considering the intellectual powers as having dignity in themselves, and separable from the heart; whereas the truth is, that the intellect becomes noble and ignoble according to the food we give it, and the kind of subjects with which it is conversant.” So we relearn an old lesson from an old text. The opening years of the twentieth century are in some ways strikingly similar to the beginning of the eighteenth. The reigns of the Georges, in our motherland, were a period of rationalism; the first years of Edward's rule are a time of materialism, in which the ancient truths of art and righteousness must be restated for an "engineering age." Feeling can never die while man lives, nor can art cease to strive to portray what man has seen or dreamed; but in the history of the world a period of imagination is ever followed by a time of criticism and comment or perhaps dull negation. After Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton came Pope and Johnson and the echoes of Voltaire; after Scott and Tennyson Spencer and Huxley. Just a hundred years ago appeared the lyrical ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, that "new world" of romantic poetry; and thus genius is ever reincarnated from time to time. The new man must ever and anon be summoned forth by the new prophet; the poet must cry out in the arid waste of a mere life that is not true living. A time of national expansion is the very time for us to exclaim anew that we are children of ideas, and that ideas are born of sentiment. When a scientist declares that literature is a "frill" which ought not to have any place in a modern college curriculum, so crowded with scientific and really useful studies, there is need to go back to Botticelli for a fresh start and a little elementary instruction; for to-day, as in his picture, the cold north wind is cruelly blowing upon the gaysomehearted spirit of creative beauty, and clutching her with his freezing fingers. He who despises, or deems superfluous in a practical age, the "frills" of Dante or Tennyson, should read for his reproof and instruction in righteousness such wise words as those lately spoken by an American who stood alike for letters and for right living: "Commonly, a man is said to be practical who looks out keenly for his own interests, and succeeds in getting possession of much property. He may do this by industry and thrift, or he may do it by taking advantage of the weakness of his fellows. In either case success entitles him to the reputation of being practical. Or a man may be entitled to this epithet if he concerns himself only with material things, and if the product of his effort is strictly utilitarian. In short, a man is practical if he gets what he wants, and keeps it. This is a low view of life, and wholly leaves out of consideration the most important part of it. The true and broad meaning of practical' is a wise adaptation of means to the end in view, and the end in view is an essential part of the practicality. A man who succeeds in making a good sonnet is as practical as a man who manu 6 factures a good wheelbarrow. A perfect sonnet is rare. All the ages have produced only a few-some say not a hundred altogether. Yet a little group of Shakespeare's is of more value, has been of more use to mankind, than the millions of wheelbarrows. Yet the world could get on without sonnets, and it could not dispense with wheelbarrows? Yes: but that depends upon your idea of the world. To me a world constructed wholly on the wheelbarrow plan would be intolerable. It is bad enough with the sonnets mixed in." In the progress of the world, whether in republic or in monarchy, the few lead and the many are led, often very slowly and imperfectly. The old lessons must be taught anew to every generation. It is not enough to say that "progress is in the air"; we must define progress with accuracy and promote it with patience as well as zeal. Patriotism, liberty, religion, duty, art-these may be in the air indeed; it is our business to put them into men's souls and lives. Philosophy is the guide of life; but philosophy is more than wisdom, it is the love of wisdom, and love is sentiment. It was sentiment that dominated the work of Jesus and Paul in founding Christian ethics upon the basis of love. The "ministry" to-day is service, and service of every sort must be consecrated by feeling for the served. The man of medicine, from Sir Thomas Browne and his "Christian Morals " to John Brown and his "Rab and his Friends," may become, and sometimes has become, even more than his fellow-worker from the divinity school, a messenger of intimate good to the individual and the home. American politics and civics would have been poor indeed without the sentiment that shaped the constructive order of our constitutions and laws. Jefferson, with all his varied practicalities, was an idealist; and even in the cool papers composing The Federalist there runs, as through the ages, "one increasing purpose that is often a passion. Jefferson, in his first inaugural, spoke of "that harmony and affection without which liberty and life itself are but dreary things"; and Hamilton, in the opening lines of the first of The Federalist papers, made haste to claim that the settlement of the Union would "add the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism." Thus the leader, in any field, is he who, as in the Greek torch-race, holds in his hand a burning fire and transmits it to others. In order to perceive to the full, the intellect must apprehend the wish as well as the fact. Still more is such perception demanded of him who would portray. Said Dryden of Shakespeare: "When he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too." That is why Dumas declared that the greatest of the Elizabethans "has gone to the bottom of everything, divined everything, said everything." There can be no divination without sympathy between the seer-and the poet is a seer in a double sense-and the seen. Hard and narrow is Dryden's famous "Three poets, in three distant ages born, |