narrow perceptive and emotional nature, and opening up the mind to a consciousness of the general law, moulds anew the man, rescues him perforce from brutal appetites, and materially aids him in attaining that likeness unto God which is his true vocation. This most valuable quality in art has been acknowledged and celebrated by the sages and poets of all ages. Ovid (Pont. II. 9, 47 seq.) tells us:

- ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros.

To represent art as the teacher and refiner of mankind, is an oftrecurring theme in the poems of our Schiller, and to this same subject he has devoted a masterly exposition of his views in his "Letters upon Aesthetic Education." From what has been previously said respecting the nature of art, the close relationship in which it stands to religion, will at once be seen. A direct influence upon the will, we grant, it does not exert; whereas it is of the very essence of religion to develop a practical effect upon the character. Art is satisfied, apart from all set aim and purpose, in exhibiting the oneness of a speciality perceptible to the senses, and its more general and intrinsic significance discernible only by the intellect, in order that its representations may be enjoyed with corresponding freedom in the mental view or perception, and thus assists in causing that devout and rever ent attitude of the soul, in which the relation of a particular subject to the Divine and universal is consummated by a simple act of the will. Hence, then, a religious element is found, on the one hand, in every genuine production of art; and, on the other, all real religion is seen to be creative in an artistic point of view, so that a large portion of the principles laid down by Schiller in the work just mentioned, could be converted, with some slight modification, into an argument for religious education. For the harmony, which he sought to establish between the special and the universal law, can be taught after all by aesthetic instruction only as an object of contemplation; its realization in the individual himself is the effect of vital religion, or, in more definite terms, of the religion which He founded, who could truly say of Himself, "I and the Father are one," and who in His own person, as God and man, exhibited the most perfect union of the individual finite and the Divine natures.

Of the educating power of art, and more especially of poetry, in the way above indicated, our pedagogical reformers had no conception. They felt nothing of that divine breath, which breathes through every genuine work of art, and remained utterly insensible to that higher inspiration, which establishes. the poet in intimate communion with the Deity, and imparts to him superabundantly above everything which he himself kuows or intends. They viewed poetry simply as a medium for communicating rational instruction to children, in a form which they could master and retain. Hence, from the poems already in existence for the use of schools, they selected only those from which an intelligible moral could readily be drawn; hence, too, their extraordinary preference for fables. All others must be stripped of their poetic drapery, and stand forth in naked, sober intelligibility; while those, which they themselves prepared, were merely bald, didactic prose disguised in execrable rhyme. In proof of this, we may refer not only to the scattered verses in Basedow's "Elements," and the various poetical compilations published in accordance with his suggestions for the express use of schools, but also to the fact that this mania for purely intellectual tuition has seized upon our hymn-books, spoiling the good old matter they contained, and supplying its place with new and far inferior material. In this process the expressions of the orthodox piety of former generations were not expelled solely on account of doctrinal considerations; on the contrary, when Gerhard's lines:

it is quite plain that no objection to the sense prompted these alterations, but a rage for sobriety of language, which is naturally averse to every form of poetical expression. Pestalozzi, whose poetic capabilities are displayed in his "Leonard and Gertrude," "Hermit's Evening Hour," and other productions, was personally free from these barbaric tastes; but the onesidedness of his system deprived his pupils of the opportunity of deriving any profit from his great imaginative gifts. The effect of these erroneous views upon the minds of children, and of the public generally, was soon evidenced in the repression and decline of a pure and simple taste for art. Only that poetry was approved, from which a clearly defined moral could be extracted, and the characters in which were distinctly represented as examples to be followed or avoided. With no recognition of the truth that in poetry, no less than in the order of the universe itself, a moral, as well as a poetical justice, is even in process of fulfilment, they were, of course, completely unable to discern in what way the "Werther" and "Elective Affinities" of Göthe, or even the plays of Shakspeare, with their coarse and frequently indecorous expressions, could be turned to profitable account. In this particular, a change for the better in the art of education has been gaining ground. Parents, who remember the childish trash, or dull compendia of "useful knowledge," which formed the mental pabulum of their youth, may well rejoice at the excellent books which their children read with such unflagging interest and wondering admiration. Poetry is no longer regarded as a kind of electuary, wherewith to disguise the taste of lessons and admonitions that are unpalatable to the youthful appetite, but as a vital element, in which children are to breathe and move, which is, in fact, as indispensable to their peculiar intellectual life, as water to the fish. Instead of histories of the "good William" and the "naughty Richard," the allegory and the fairy tale are no longer laid on the shelf as forbidden objects of curiosity, but are reinstated in the public favor as admirably in unison with the imaginative temperament of the young, and excellently adapted, not merely to encourage high and generous aspiration, but, by giving exercise to the imagination, to kindle a sense of the depth and riches of that invisible realm, which is so greatly overshadowed by the daily formalities and occurrences of common life. So, too, the collections of poems intended for somewhat older children - for example, those of

and

Echtermayer, Hiecke and Wackernagel- have assumed an entirely different form; and it is now acknowledged by persons of every religious school, that a ballad of Schiller, Göthe or Uhland, and a song of Körner, Arndt or Schenkendorf, acts more powerfully upon the understanding, and is retained more lastingly by the memory than one of Gellert's Fables, or such metrical narratives as those about "little Louisa," who was a sad wild child," Haus," who even in long clothes was a mischievous urchin, "greedy Fritz," or the turbulent " Hellmuth," who caused his good teacher much sorrow, and the like. Two things, however, remain to be achieved: in the first place, these text-books should consist of strictly classic poetry; in after-days the pupil will have abundant opportunities of becoming acquainted with the indifferent and the bad; and, in the second, life should not in this respect lag behind the school, but all endeavors should be made to banish false prophets, and to introduce, yet more and more upon the stage and in the concert-room, the heaven-inspired interpreters of genuine art, in order that these places may contribute to the invigoration and refinement of the mind, instead of subserving, as at present, the purposes of a pernicious, because a purely sensual, enjoyment.

In respect of the advantages derivable from poetry as a means of juvenile culture, we can scarcely expect to gain much instruction from the method pursued in English schools. Less capable of perceiving ideal principles than their German rivals, English teachers bestow their chief pains upon the formation of sound judgment and practical ability, and attach comparatively little importance to the development of the affections and the imagi. nation. It is, consequently, not surprising that the English prefer to borrow books of allegory and poetry from their continental cousins, showing, nevertheless, in the selection they make, an unerring appreciation of the really good and excellent.

higher schools, poetic taste is awakened and exercised only by the works of classical antiquity; and, despite the tenacity, with which they cling to notions we regard as superannuated, the method they follow is in two points worthy of our attention. In the first place, in choosing their material, the quantity to which the attention of the scholar is directed is but small, and in this they strive to render him perfectly at home; in the second, it is evident that English thoroughness, as it is called, is a totally different thing from our philological hair-splitting, being carefully.

adapted to the pupil's wants, and leaving much to be worked out by his own independent conception and appropriation of the poem. As the result of this method of procedure, Wiese observes that "a truly classic culture and reverence for antiquity is much more common in England than with us, however long the roll of celebrated names which German philology is able to display;" and we may add to this remark that another consequence is certainly apparent in the correctness and purity which distinguish the productions of even second and third rate English poets above French and German poetry.

Whatever may be the short-comings of the English in the department of instruction last under our consideration, it must be confessed that they excel all other nations in the cultivation and discipline of the disposition and the will. Nothing can be more alien to this practical people than the neglect with which, in this particular, the one-sided intellectuality of our educational reformers is justly chargeable. Although, as we have remarked above, the whole system of instruction of Basedow and his followers kept practical utility constantly in view, and one of the fundamental principles of the Pestalozzian method insisted strongly upon the necessity of educating the pupil not merely to increase his knowledge, but also, and in still higher degree, to develop practical ability, it must, nevertheless, be admitted that repeated experiment and failure have shown, that the practice of interfering with the normal evolution of children's minds, by urging them to make the impressions they have acquired through the senses, the immediate object of intelligent reflection, contribute neither to the activity of the faculties, nor to capability of performance. They were not suffered to act, until some consideration had been given to the question, whether the motive ⚫ of their conduct was resolvable into a general rule, and they knew so much about the reasons for which, and the different ways in which, a thing could be done, as to lose entirely the disposition and the aptitude to grasp promply and energetically what the exigencies of circumstance and the occasion might require. In the observation addressed one day to Wiese by an English clergyman: "In Germany you are as zealous after science, as if the Tree of Knowledge were the Tree of Life," the weakness and error of this theory are strikingly exhibited. With this want of a proper co-adaptation of instruction to the requirements of daily life, the absence of a suitable limitation of