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leads us on to the summer, the autumn, and Romans, are passed by because the and the winter of our days. The Apostle knowledge of them costs labor, because not only says, "whatsoever things are the entrance to these shrines is through true, whatsoever things are honest, what- the fore-court of a learned tongue. Ask soever things are pure," but also, "what- many a youth whether ideas of beauty soever things are lovely, whatsoever and of intellectual pleasure are associated things are of good report, if there be in his mind with his Virgil, his Horace, any virtue, and if there be any praise, Cicero, Homer, Theocritus, and perhaps think on these things." The sciences of he will tell you Yes, with an easy reading the beautiful then belong to the age of translation of them; but in the Greek and beauty in human life, and the Creator has Latin, they are Classics, and with most ordained that they should be united in youths the Classics and intellectual pleabonds of mutual love. sure are widely separated notions. Just But what are sciences of the beautiful, the very form which contributes so much and how must we love and practice them, of their beauty is that which makes them that our practice may be beautiful also? hateful and troublesome to the lazy pupil. These questions seem to me, on account The monkey would gladly have the sweet of their importance and even necessity in kernal, but he will not crack the hard our times, to be the best possible intro-nut; it breaks his pretty teeth. duction to a public examination such as this, that we may secure a noble rivalry between the arts themselves and those who are pursuing them.

Is not the Greek a beautiful language? do not its writers deserve to be learned, if only for the rules and examples of the beautiful they afford? The present ex

we shall find as many lovers of the most beautiful of all beautiful languages as

The word "beautiful" is commonly amination will be your answer. Perhaps made synonymous with "easy," for light and thoughtless youth shun nothing so much as trouble and labor; what recom- once there were reckoned Muses, nine! (mends itself at first sight, what is com- Perhaps we shall find not nearly so many. prehended at the first glance, is preferred; O, it is an idle and a wanton age when what requires thought, zeal, and exercise, that only is called beautiful which is though it be of the utmost value, is neg-easy, and nothing pleases us but what lected. Nothing is read but the dear flies into our very mouths! "I went by mother-tongue, especially when what is the field of the slothful," says Solomon, read was lightly written, and is only "and by the vineyard of the man void of sugar-plums in the mouth. Perhaps we understanding; and lo, it was all grown add the French, partly because it is so over with thorns, and nettles had covered easy to learn, and partly because it con- the face thereof, and the stone wall theretains so many sugar-plums. There is the of was broken down. Then I saw and gingerbread of pretty romances, pretty considered it well: I looked upon it and poems, pretty stories, comedies, and received instruction. Yet a little sleep, a plays; the cut of the language is of the little slumber, a little folding of the hands latest fashion, its style is easy and to to sleep; so shall thy poverty come as catch the eye; by all means, therefore, one that travelleth, and thy want as an be it learned, say they. But the true armed man." fountains, the everlasting monuments of

Thine casy knowledge will bring thee the science of the beautiful, the Greeks, neither honor nor bread; not rightly

That yon a poet are, good sir, that gives me special joy;

That you no more than poet are, that doth me much annoy.*

hast thou learned; thou hast put to sleep cellences. Among the English, Milton thy spirit, wasted thy best time, the first was a great scholar and statesman as he young power of thy soul. By forever was poet; and who does not reverence trifling thou hast lost the habit of earnest- the great names of Grotius and Erasmus? ness; by giving thyself up to sport, labor, Grotius was Theologian, Jurist, Stateswithout which no work can be accomplish-man, IIistorian, Scholar, and Philosopher, ed, no glory, no aim of life attained, be- to as great an extent as he was Poet, and comes insupportable and impossible. even national poet. Every one knows Thou hast eaten sweets till they have the epigram of Lessing. ruined thy digestion. Soon the beautiful will be no longer beautiful, but wearisome and disgusting, because thou hast enjoyed it to excess, and thou wilt languish| Every art and science has in it an elelike a sick man, at the very fountains of ment of Beauty, but this beauty is only health. O hear, who has ears to hear; to be enjoyed by the exercise of unconfor what I say is terrible truth. Pleasure querable industry. All individuals who and Beauty when thus pursued become have by nature a strongly developed gift hateful in the end,-Sirens which allure for the pursuit of any one of them, illusand mislead you, Circes which transform trate this. What study seems to the you. You will be a cuckoo to prate common understanding dryer than Mamiserable verse, a crow to write reviews thematics, and yet what great mathemaor a peacock or a goose in guise of a bombastic or a pleasant-cackling preacher.

tician does not find in them the greatest delight? Galileo in his prison consoled Every art and science, whether called himself with his discoveries as the noblest "fine" or ugly, requires labor, industry, doctrines of the beautiful, and Kepler depractice; poets and orators, whose works clared be would not exchange one of his are commonly the only part of literature for a Dukedom. We see with what love which is reckoned among the Fine Arts, a jurist, a statesman, a physician, a natnever become great without industry and uralist, a historian, a student of mechanlabor. The reviver of German poetic art, ics, yes, even a diplomatist, or a stndent Opitz, wrote Latin elegantly, was well of heraldry, live in their science, providacquinted with ancient literature, and ed they are formed for it by nature, have made as good Latin as he did German studied it thoroughly, and are in a posiverses; the modern reviver of it, Haller, tion to practice it successfully. Every was certainly as great as a scholar, phi- labor accomplished is sweet, every diffilosopher, physician, naturalist, and bota-culty and obscurity stimulates their zeal; nist, as he was as a poet. The elder every fortunate discovery-never made Schlegel translated Sophocles at school, without previous labor-is their dearest and studied his art in ancient models. In reward; verily, all these do something what branch of learning has not Lessing besides plucking fading flowers and suckdistinguished himself? His poetry and ing indigestible sugar-plums. The bees his style are perhaps the least of his ex- do not get their honey without labor; it

A good deal greater, we fancy. Herder himself is a better example of the union of scholar and poet than any of those he adduces. -TR.

Es freuet mich, mein Herr, dass Ihr ein
Dichter seyd;

Doch seyd Ihr sonst nicht mehr, mein Herr,
das ist mir leid.

is the drones who steal what was gather-relics linger in so many places. Then ed by others and does not belong to first was heard of the so-called seven free

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Gram. loquitur, Dia. verba docet, Rhe. verba ministrat,

Mus. canit, Ar. numerat, Ge ponderat, Ast.

colit astra.

It is not therefore lazy and superficial facility that creates beauty in the sciences and the arts; what does create it? The ancients called such sciences artes que ad humanitatem pertinent, ad humanitatem Even here we see those most prosaic of informant, sciences which form us into studies, grammar, logic, even mathemamen, and perhaps we might best name tics and astronomy enumerated among them formative sciences. What forms them. Afterwards separate spheres were the powers of our souls is beautiful; what assigned to grammar, philosophy, and does not, does not deserve the name, mathematics; what remained became the though it be covered all over with tinsel. distinct province of the Fine Arts, and to I know we have in these modern times them was left nothing but the noble art lost this idea. We oppose the sciences of of verse-making, and a bit of rhetoric or the Beautiful to the higher, more earnest, the fine art of spinning sentences. The more fundamental ones, as though the truly fine arts, those namely whith inlatter could deserve the name, and yet form the soul, which create thought, could be trifling, or low, or flat, or dry, which give taste and judgment,-in short, or superficial, or unmanly. Allow me, all the strength and substance of the then, a little space to show the falsity of spirit were taken away, and now one this distinction, and to recommend to might indeed distinguish them from the you the true conception of the beautiful, useful, the fundamental, the earnest, the that is, the formative element in all noble-sciences which are, as I view sciences. them, the sciences of Beauty themselves—

I say, then, that the sciences of the for as the others were left, they were ugly Beautiful cannot be separated from, and enough. Will any one tell me how we set in opposition to the fundamental sci- can have a beautiful form where there is ences, for that to which beauty belongs no substance-how one can speak beaumust be fundamental or else it is a false tifully who has no thoughts, or where and deceitful beauty. The sciences of the true, earnest, and serious aim, where beautiful and the sciences of the true true passion and the inspiration of a real cannot be opposed to one another, for the purpose ever failed to make one speak former are no courtjesters: they too have well? Even the spider does not spin her earnest aims, and can only be furthered web without a purpose; she means to by strict rules and the earnest use of catch fiies; but we with most of our fine means. And finally, the sciences of the wordwebs of empty rhetoric do not even beautiful and higher sciences do not stand do that. opposed to one another as though the former were trifling and of lower rank; both have ideals, each after its kind; both require high and richly endowed souls.

What then are the sciences of the

* Barbarous, mnemonic verses, enumerating the chief studies pursued in the schools of the

middle ages-The famous Trivium and Quad

All these distinctions rest on misunder-rivium, or course of three, and course of four standing and misuse of the classification studies, which together formed the mediaval notion of a liberal education. Dia. stands for of those barbarous scholastic times whose Dialectica or Logic; the rest are obvious.-TR.

-

Beautiful? and why do we call them so? chart of human knowledge in any proEither the word must mean that we learn vince, with its lights and shadows, and to in them what is beautiful, and why it is sharpen one's wit, one's inventive faculty so; but this we never learn by rules and judgment at every step by the truth alone, never without materials and ex- which one discovered and the error which amples;;—or they are the sciences which another encountered. Is there a greater supply a beautiful form to these materi- picture in the world than the world itself, als, and here the idea of the beautiful is as cosmology, natural history, and phyidentical with that of the formative. No sical astronomy reveal it? a finer or a science can be called a science of the more interesting drama than the hnman Beautiful when it merely racks our me- soul itself reveals, whether in a wide or mories, gives us words without thoughts, a narrow sphere of activity, with its fadogmas and assertions without light or culties and powers, its duties and relaproof or exercise of practical judgment; tions, passions and impulses? If one in short, when it does not form the cannot speak here, by a true and compowers of our soul. As soon as it does plete representation of these things, with this it becomes agreeable; and the more a living power to the understanding, and it does this, the more it occupies our effectually to the heart, where can he?fancy and inventive faculty, our wit and This whole newly discovered and barbartaste, our judgment, and particularly our ous science, aesthetics, is nothing but a practical masculine judgment; the more part of logic; what we call taste is nopowers of the soul it occupies at once, the thing but a lively, quick judgment which more elements of culture it has, and does not exclude truth and profoundness, every one says the more beautiful it is.-but rather pre-supposes and requires Take, for instance, philosophy, which is them. All didactic poems are nothing usually excluded from what are called but philosophy in sensible form, fable Belles-letters. But truth lies at the foun- nothing but the representation of a genedation of all beauty, and all that is beau- ral truth present and in action. From tiful can only lead to the true and the whence did Cicero take the most beaugood. I lay it down as a principle, then, tiful, the most striking materials for his that truth, so far as it relates to man, is eloquence, but from philosophy, from the beautiful; for beauty is only the outward analysis of things themselves, of the huform of truth. Dry ontology, cosmology, man heart, and the human understandpsychology, theology, logic, ethics, poli- ing? Philosophy therefore is not only tics, please no one: but make the truths one of the sciences that pertain to beauof all these sciences living; place in clear ty, but is the mother of the beautiful.light their origin, their connection, their Rhetoric and poetry owe to it all that use, and application; bring them so near they have that is truly informing, useful, to the soul of the reader that it discovers or agreeable. Next to it is history, so with the discoverer, observes with the far as it iucludes a knowledge of countries, observer, judges with the philosopher, men, their governments and states, their and applies and exercises the truth with manners and religions, their virtues and the good man, and what more beautiful vices. If these subjects are pursued as sciences can there be than these? It is we often with astonishment and aversion a great attraction to see the connection of see them pursued, they are surely nothing truths, a high satisfaction to survey the but the rubbish of science; pursued as

they might be and ought to be, so as to ing sciences are ever the most beautiful. impart interesting, clear, and valuable Time would fail me to show how all knowledge, such as informs the student's the rules of beauty are nothing except so mind with wisdom, can there be sciences far as they serve truth and goodness; more beautiful than those of geography how all the flowers of eloquence are and history? Who does not willingly nothing, except so far as they favor truth read and hear history? What cultivated and goodness: how the best part is wantman does not receive the greater part of ing to all sciences if one robs them of his culture through history of others, and beauty; how every science of each in its experience, which is the history of him- own way, can have it and should have it ; self? And are the epic poem and the how no science need be rude or repulsive, drama anything more than history, true and even the abstractest knowledge has or fabulous, adorned with the attractions its attraction and its beauty, if only it is of language, outward representation, and pursued in a way to inform and be inimagination? —and is not many a history structive. Enough for to-day: to-mortruly related and described with beauty row, I trust, will prove that every science more attractive than an exaggerated epic here pursued is a science of beauty, beor the false representations of romance? cause it is made agreeable and interesting, It only depends then on choice, method, because it is learned with pleasure and and diction, that the teacher make inter-love, because it is taught in a natural and esting all that he brings forward, offer it attractive manner.

in a form to attract the understanding, And you, pupils, now passing out of move the heart, and excite all the powers youth and becoming men, cast aside the of his hearer's soul, to turn history into puppets of childhood, the empty grass the truest rhetoric and the truest poetry. and flower garlands which fade so soon In the histories of the ancients, history and then are so disgusting; love what is and oratory are united; the finest speech-worthy of love in every form, but ever es are incorporated into their histories, in relation to truth, goodness and usefuland cannot be understood or appreciated ness. Love and study the ancient lanwithout them. The good narrator must guages; they are the sources and patterns follow the same rules as the poet; and if of all that is noble, good, and beautiful. the orator or the poet would not merely Love philosopy, theology, and history; give pleasure, but improve, inform, and they nourish the heart, and fill the mind excite to sympathetic action the minds of with thought, and thus furnish the matethose he addresses, he has the same aim rial of all that is capable of receiving or as the historian or the philosopher. In worthy of a beautiful form. Shun not short, truth, beauty, and virtue are the labor and toil; as soon as you enter into three graces of human knowledge, three the spirit of your work, toil will disapinseparable sisters. He who would have pear, changed into beauty and enjoybeauty without truth, grasps at the wind; inent. he who studies for truth and beauty And thou Frst Cause and Author of all without virtue, which is their use and truth, goodness, and beauty, accept the practical application, pursues a shadow. consecration of this school and the exerBeautiful form can only be made visible cises of these days to the pursuit of true and living in beautiful substance; the loveliness and beauty, which is the true truest, richest, most useful, most inform-culture of human souls.

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