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The Home of Taste, 3 
wherein to find epitomes of the natural world, and where, secure from the 
commotion and dust that prevail without, we may cherish the affections that 
lie deepest in our nature, and from which spring the noblest and most 
enduring results in the exaltation of our intellectual and spiritual faculties. 
A Home of Taste is a tasteful home, wherein everything is a reflection of 
refined thoughts and chaste desires. It is a school of the heart, in which 
human sympathies teach profounder lessons than are found in books, and the 
ornaments of walls and windows suggest a thousand modes of being cheaply 
happy. In such a home Beauty presides over the education of the sentiments, 
and while the intellect is ripened by the many means which exist for the 
acquisition of knowledge, the moral nature is refined by those silent appeals 
of Nature and of Art, which are the foundation of Taste. If Taste is an 
application to nature of the same faculty which in morals enables us to 
distinguish between right and wrong, then the Beautiful is the highest form, 
or rather the embodiment of the purest ethics ; and to be in constant com¬ 
munication with it, drawing our inspirations from its most palpable phenomena, 
is to place our spiritual natures under the guidance of a goddess who cannot 
lead them wrong. No matter in what form the cultivation of Taste may 
manifest itself, in paintings and sculptures ; in the analysis of scenery ; in the 
grouping of flowers ; in the embellishment of the window or the table ; in the 
cultivation of criticism, and the appreciation of what is true and good in 
Art generally ; refinement of manners, sensitiveness of personal honour, kind¬ 
liness of feelings, and a deeper devotion of religion will be its sure attendants. 
We cannot come into the presence of any work of high-class art without at 
the instant experiencing emotions that increase our happiness, nor can we take 
interest in the simplest pursuit of a leisure hour, if that pursuit be pure and 
pleasing, without at once passing into an atmosphere of higher moral purity 
than we breathe at other times, amid 
“ The weariness, the fever, and the fret,” 
that, without such an antidote, harden the heart by degrees, restrain the 
aspirations of the inner life, and arrest the development of our spiritual 
capabilities. Such “ enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. 
They are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us.” 
But the Home of Taste is not necessarily the result of a lavish expenditure 
— the most humble may command it. Though the several Rustic Adorn¬ 
ments treated of in this work admit of extension, commensurate with the 
