very last line and boundary to which science has advanced; because it has ever been the object of his life to assist every intellectual gift of nature, however munificent, and however splendid, with every resource that art could suggest, and every attention diligence could bestow. 8. But some men may be disposed to ask,-" Why conduct my understanding with such endless care? and what is the use of so much knowledge?" What is the use of so much knowledge? What is the use of so much life? What are we to do with the seventy years of existence allotted to us? and how are we to live them out to the last? I solemnly declare, that, but for the love of knowledge, I should consider the life of the meanest hedger and ditcher as preferable to that of the greatest and richest man in existence; for the fire of our minds is like the fire which the Persians burn on the mountains, -it flames night and day, and is immortal, and not to be quenched! Upon something it must act and feed,-upon the pure spirit of knowledge, or upon the foul dregs of polluting passions. 9. Therefore, when I say, in conducting your understanding, love knowledge with a great love, with a vehement love, with a love coëval with life, what do I say but love innocence; love virtue; love purity of conduct; love that which, if you are rich and great, will sanctify the Providence which has made you so, and make men call it justice; love that which, if you are poor, will render your poverty respectable, and make the proudest feel it unjust to laugh at the meanness of your fortunes; love that which will comfort you, adorn and you, never quit you, which will open to you the kingdom of thought, and all the boundless regions of conception, as an asylum against the cruelty, the injustice, and the pain that may be your lot in the outer world, that which will make your motives habitually great and honorable, and light up in an instant a thousand noble disdains at the very thought of meanness and of fraud? 10. Therefore, if any young man have embarked his life in the pursuit of Knowledge, let him go on without doubting or fearing the event: let him not be intimidated by the cheerless beginnings of Knowledge, by the darkness from which she springs, by the difficulties which hover around her, by the wretched habitations in which she dwells, by the want and sorrow which sometimes journey in her train; but let him ever follow her as the Angel that guards him, and as the Genius of his life. She will bring him out at last into the light of day, and exhibit him to the world comprehensive in acquirements, fertile in resources, rich in imagination, strong in reasoning, prudent and powerful above his fellows in all the relations and in all the offices of life. LESSON LXII. 1RUS' KIN, JOHN, was born in London in the year 1819. In 1843, he published a work entitled "Modern Painters," in which he advocates the claims of the moderns over the ancients to superiority in the art of landscape-painting. He has published several works since, and is still devoted to the study of his art. The brilliancy of his diction, and splendor of his style, never fail to secure the admiration of all. THE MAN AND THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS. DR. GEORGE WILSON. HE Industrial Arts are necessary arts. The most degraded savage must practice them, and the most civilized genius can not dispense with them. Whatever be our gifts of intellect or fortune, we can not avoid being hungry, and thirsty, and cold, and weary, every day; and we must fight for our lives against the hunger, and thirst, and cold, and weariness, which wage an unceasing war against us. But, though the Industrial Arts are common, they are not ignoble arts. They minister, indeed, to those physical wants which we share with the lower animals; but we are raised above them as much by being industrial as by being æsthetic artists. We are the former by virtue of our superior intellect, as we are the latter by virtue of our superior imagination.. 2. It is with every-day life, and every-day cares, that the Industrial Arts have to do, - with man, not as "a little lower than the angels," but "as crushed before the moth," and weaker than the weakest of the beasts that perish, with man as a hungry, thirsty, restless, quarrelsome, naked animal. But man, because he is this, and just because he is this, is raised, by the industrial conquests which he is compelled to achieve, to a place of power and dignity, separating him by an absolutely immeasurable interval from every other animal. 3. It might appear, at first sight, as if it were not so. As industrial creatures, we often look like wretched copyists of animals far beneath us in the scale of organization; and we seem to confess as much by the names which we give them. The mason-wasp, the carpenter-bee, the mining caterpillars, the quarrying sea-slugs, execute their work in a way which we can not rival or excel. The bird is an exquisite architect; the beaver a most skillful bridgebuilder; the silk-worm the most beautiful of weavers; the spider the best of net-makers. Each is a perfect craftsman, and each has his tools always at hand. 4. Those wise creatures will do one thing rather than another, and do that one thing in different ways at differ ent times. A bird, for example, selects a place to build its nest, and accommodates its form to the particular locality it has chosen; and a bee alters the otherwise invariable shape of its cell, when the space it is working in forbids it to carry out its hexagonal plan. Yet it is impossible to watch these, or others among the lower animals, and fail to see that, to a great extent, they are mere living machines, saved from the care and anxiety which lie so heavily upon us, by their entire contentment with the present, their oblivion of the past, and their indifference to the future. 5. They do invent, they do design, they do exercise volition in wonderful ways; but their most wonderful works imply neither invention, contrivance, nor volition, but only a placid, pleasant, easily-rendered obedience to instincts which reign without rivals, and justify their despotic rule by the infallible happiness which they secure. There is nothing, accordingly, obsolete, nothing tentative, nothing progressive, in the labors of the most wonderful mechanicians among the lower animals. It has cost none of these ingenious artists any intellectual effort to learn its craft; for God gave it to each perfect in the beginning; and within the circle to which they apply, the rules which guide their work are infallible, and know no variation. 6. No feathered Ruskin' appears among the birds, to discuss before them whether their nests should be built on the principles of Grecian or Gothic architecture. No beaver, in advance of his age, patents a diving-bell. No glowworm advocates, in the hearing of her conservative sisters, the merits of new vesta-lights, or improved lucifer-matches. The silk-worms entertain no propositions regarding the substitution of machinery for bodily labor. The spiders never divide the House on the question of a Ten-hours Working Bill. The ants are as one on their Corn-laws. The bees never alter their tax upon sugar, nor dream of lessening the severities of their penal code; their drones' are slaughtered as relentlessly as they were three thousand years ago; nor has a solitary change been permitted, since first there were bees, in any of their singular domestic institutions. 7. To those wise creatures the Author of all has given, not only infallible rules for their work, but unfaltering faith in them. Labor is for them not a doubt, but a certainty. Duty is the same thing as happiness. They never grow weary of life; and death never surprises them. We are industrial for other reasons, and in a different way. Our working instincts are very few; our faith in them still more feeble; and our physical wants far greater than those of any other creature. 8. With the intellects of angels, and the bodies of earthworms, we have the power to conquer, and the need to do it. The Industrial Arts are the result of our destitution and necessities. The Fine Arts may be gracefully grouped round the five senses, the eye to the painter, the ear to the musician, the tongue to the poet, the hand to the sculptor, and the whole body, the instrument of touch, among all. The Fine Arts thus begin each with a special sense, and converge toward the body; the Industrial Arts begin with the body, and diverge toward the special senses. • 9. The shivering savage in the colder countries robs the seal and the bear, the buffalo and the deer, of the one mantle which Nature has given them. The wild huntsman, by a swift but simple transmutation, becomes the clothier, the tailor, the tanner, the currier, the leatherdresser, the glover, the saddler, the shoemaker, the tentmaker. And the tent-maker becomes quickly a house |