All through Nature and all through life we see that the things which are gloomy and unpleasant inevitably develop into brightness and happiness. Who does not know the beautiful lines:

"

Hark, hark, my soul, angelic songs are swelling O'er earth's green fields and ocean's wave-beat shore." But, in days of doubt and difficulty, how many go out into the fields to hear the immortal strains of the angelic songs which are wafted in every breeze from the four corners of the world to bear a message of hope to those who will listen?

[One knows, of course, that there have been great minds who, out of their innermost convictions, have asserted that everything ends with this life. One must respect honest thought, but the fact remains that the majority of thinkers through all the ages have held that the ultimate end of all things is Paradise, the land of Promise, where all tears will be wiped from our eyes, "and those that are good shall be happy." Quite apart from any religious belief in the life to come-and the earnest worker will always be content to be judged by his life's work-it is clearly demonstrable that there is a reward for every earnest endeavour, every loving thought and every kindly act. Why should there be a need for rewards in a life hereafter? Paradise is not merely a state of the hereafter, it is here and now. It is in the mind, and is revealed in the

thoughts of those we love and those who love us. Who that has seen his mother praying by her bedside has not felt the angels hovering near? Who that has loved his friend has not tasted the sweets of life and found that the world was good? Are these things visions to torment us with an unrealisable hope? Or are they glimmerings of a perfect realisation of all those things which we hold dearest ? If there is any virtue in thinking for oneself in the solitudes that come to all of us, surely it lies in the hope and faith that must be born when we turn our thoughts to the riddle of life and find a satisfying answer in the depths of our own souls.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE LESSONS OF ART

"Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist, and its highest effect is to make new artists.” EMERSON.

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AZLITT opens his essay On the Pleasure of
Painting" with the following words :-

"There is a pleasure in painting which none but painters know.' In writing, you have to contend with the world in painting, you have only to carry on a friendly strife with Nature. From the moment that you take up the pencil and look Nature in the face you are at peace with your own heart. No angry passions rise to disturb the silent progress of the work, to shake the hand, or dim the brow; no irritable humours are set afloat. You have no absurd opinions to combat, no point to strain, no adversary to crush, no fool to annoy. You are actuated by fear or favour to no man. There is ' no juggling here,' no sophistry, no intrigue, no tampering with the evidence, no attempt to make black white or white black; but you resign yourself into the hands of a greater power, that of Nature, with the simplicity of a child and the devotion of an enthusiast. 'Study with joy her manner, and with rapture taste her style.' The mind is calm and full at the same time. The hand and eye are equally employed. In tracing the commonest

object, a plant or the stump of a tree, you learn something every moment. You perceive unexpected differences where you looked for no such thing. You try to set down what you see-find out your error, and correct it. You need not play tricks, or purposely mistake: with all your pains you are still far short of the mark. Patience grows out of the endless pursuit and turns it into a luxury."

I commend the whole essay to the reader who wishes to find some indications of the beauties of the world of Art. But what thoughts even this short passage stimulates! Art is not merely the revelation of beauty and truth. It shows us how perfect Nature is, and how imperfect man is, while it stimulates us to struggle patiently after perfection, in the sure hope that we shall approach nearer to it with each industrious day. While we learn to appreciate the beauty of common things, the tranquillity of Nature encourages us to calm philosophy. We see that all the little tasks have their own part in the sublime whole, and this reflection invests the meanest of our labours with a sublimity of which our minds were ignorant.

Art is a great educator. It is the expression of the earliest form of writing, when men conveyed their meanings to one another through the medium of rude pictures. In a square of canvas an artist can convey with one flash of illumination a story, or a thought, that the writer could only impart through the medium of hundreds of words. In this sense

Art is the easiest form of education which a man can take up, and while he is learning history, or beauty, or mythology, his feelings are stirred by the glowing colours which heighten the effect of the painter's message.

Art is the revealer of Nature. When Turner was painting his marvellous pictures, there was a huge controversy about his work. People said that his lurid colours were untrue to Nature, and, at a casual glance, they appear to be so. Yet when on occasion the lighting in the sea or sky recalls one of his pictures we find that his work was true, after all. The only failing was due to the limitations of the human mind, which is too imperfect to reproduce the gorgeous manifestations of Nature. Yet a study of Turner's pictures enables us to appreciate the wonders of the Mind that paints the heavens with such hues that we cannot copy them, or spreads across a patch of country such harmonies of mass and colour that the merest reproduction of them upon canvas is a sight that rouses beautiful thoughts for years afterwards.

The man who studies the work of the great artists learns to appreciate the beauties of the world around him, through the eyes of men who have an instinct for finding beauty. He sees the loveliness of the world, and sees it ever afterwards: when the thunder clouds roll up he does not complain because