z6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



danger of becoming a practical one. Yet, in the shape of elementary 

 drawing, the rudiments of art are beginning to take their proper place 

 in our schools as a necessary and indispensable element of all real 

 education, and the art galleries and the foreign musicians of a few of 

 our older cities are beginning to exert their influence, if a slight one, 

 in introducing higher ideas of the importance of art into our new coun- 

 try. They will have but a limited influence, however, till the study 

 of the fine arts takes its proper place among us as a necessary element 

 in every conception of true education. 



There is one form of art-study, and that, perhaps, the highest, 

 which is open to all, even to the humblest student, and the most ele- 

 mentary school, and that is, the study of poetry. It is a prime element 

 in any conception of a liberal education, which shall take as its chief 

 instrument of language-training the mother-tongue, that the real study 

 of English poetry will take the place of the pretended study of classi- 

 cal poetry. When that time comes, we may expect to see the great 

 poets of our native tongue exerting the same influence in the culture 

 and training of our children that Homer and iEschylus really exercised 

 over that of the Greeks. We shall not know what that influence is 

 capable of becoming till we have a real study of English, in place of a 

 sham study of classical literature. The great Greek philosopher says 

 that poetry is truer than history. Sure I am that we s*hall one day 

 come to see that in neglecting to train and cultivate the imagination, 

 we are neglecting the most powerful of all the faculties. 



Ladies and gentlemen, I have thus given you, very feebly and im- 

 perfectly, an outline of a scheme of liberal education, applicable to a 

 whole free people, which shall use that people's own language on the 

 one hand, and the great instrument of modern science on the other, as 

 its chief disciplinary instruments, in lieu of the obsolescent scheme for 

 a liberal class education, based upon the study of dead languages as 

 its chief educating instrument. As a means for realizing that scheme 

 for the liberal education of the whole people, I believe that we must 

 sooner or later have in this our republic one homogeneous system of 

 free schools, from the lowest to the highest. The first step of that 

 education will be taken from the benches of the primary school, its 

 last lessons learned in the lecture-rooms and laboratories of universities, 

 free from all trammels of sectarian narrowness or class distinctions. 

 It will be from first to last a homogeneous, logically compacted, con- 

 sistent training in all available knowledge, to all attainable wisdom, 

 free to all men and all women to pursue, to the extent the faculties God 

 has endowed them with will carry them. It is a Utopian vision, you 

 will say, this of popular liberal education. Say rather it is the neces- 

 sary safeguard and supplement of free institutions ; to despair of it is 

 to despair of the republic. 



