"On the city's paved street
Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet;
Let spouting fountains cool the air,
Singing in the sun-baked square;
Let statue, picture, park, and hall,
Ballad, flag, and festival
The past restore, the day adorn,
And make to-morrow a new morn!"

We have introduced into our schools, of late years, lessons in drawing,
modelling, and designing,--not sufficiently, but in a promising and
hopeful way. Emerson taught that it is the office of art to educate the
perception of beauty; and he precisely describes one of the most recent
of the new tendencies in American education and social life, when he
says: "Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction
between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten." That sentence is the
inspiration of one of the most recent of the efforts to improve the arts
and crafts, and to restore to society the artistic craftsman. But how
slow is the institutional realization of this ideal of art education! We
are still struggling in our elementary and secondary schools to get a
reasonable amount of instruction in drawing and music, and to transfer
from other subjects a fair allotment of time to these invaluable
elements of true culture, which speak a universal language. Yet the
ultimate object of art in education is to teach men to see nature to be
beautiful and at the same time useful, beautiful because alive and
reproductive, useful while symmetrical and fair. Take up to-day the last
essays on education, the last book on landscape architecture, or the
freshest teachings of the principles of design, and you will find them
penetrated with Emerson's doctrine of art as teacher of mankind. Emerson
insists again and again that true culture must open the sense of