have felt, had you passed beneath it at the time when so many of
England's dearest children were being defended by the strength of heart
of men born at its foot, how often among the delicate Indian palaces,
whose marble was pallid with horror, and whose vermilion was darkened
with blood, the remembrance of its rough grey rocks and purple heaths
must have risen before the sight of the Highland soldier; how often the
hailing of the shot and the shriek of battle would pass away from his
hearing, and leave only the whisper of the old pine branches--"Stand
fast, Craig Ellachie!"

You have, in these two nations, seen in direct opposition the effects
on moral sentiment of art without nature, and of nature without art.
And you see enough to justify you in suspecting--while, if you choose
to investigate the subject more deeply and with other examples, you
will find enough to justify you in _concluding_--that art,
followed as such, and for its own sake, irrespective of the
interpretation of nature by it, is destructive of whatever is best and
noblest in humanity; but that nature, however simply observed, or
imperfectly known, is, in the degree of the affection felt for it,
protective and helpful to all that is noblest in humanity.

You might then conclude farther, that art, so far as it was devoted to
the record or the interpretation of nature, would be helpful and
ennobling also.

And you would conclude this with perfect truth. Let me repeat the
assertion distinctly and solemnly, as the first that I am permitted to
make in this building, devoted in a way so new and so admirable to the
service of the art-students of England--Wherever art is practised for
its own sake, and the delight of the workman is in what he _does_