For to cultivate sympathy you must be among living things and
thinking about them, and to cultivate admiration you must be among
beautiful things and looking at them. 'The steel of Toledo and the
silk of Genoa did but give strength to oppression and lustre to
pride,' as Mr. Ruskin says; let it be for you to create an art that
is made by the hands of the people for the joy of the people, to
please the hearts of the people, too; an art that will be your
expression of your delight in life. There is nothing 'in common
life too mean, in common things too trivial to be ennobled by your
touch'; nothing in life that art cannot sanctify.

You have heard, I think, a few of you, of two flowers connected
with the aesthetic movement in England, and said (I assure you,
erroneously) to be the food of some aesthetic young men. Well, let
me tell you that the reason we love the lily and the sunflower, in
spite of what Mr. Gilbert may tell you, is not for any vegetable
fashion at all. It is because these two lovely flowers are in
England the two most perfect models of design, the most naturally
adapted for decorative art - the gaudy leonine beauty of the one
and the precious loveliness of the other giving to the artist the
most entire and perfect joy. And so with you: let there be no
flower in your meadows that does not wreathe its tendrils around
your pillows, no little leaf in your Titan forests that does not
lend its form to design, no curving spray of wild rose or brier
that does not live for ever in carven arch or window or marble, no
bird in your air that is not giving the iridescent wonder of its
colour, the exquisite curves of its wings in flight, to make more
precious the preciousness of simple adornment.

We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of