CULTIVATE A TASTE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL.
What is "the beautiful?" It is what beautifies and graces life. It is the antithesis of the real and practical. It is the glory of life, for it elevates the heart and mind into the contemplation of, and sympathy with, the ideal—the spiritual. Its language is the language of emotion; it startles, and thrills, and stirs within us divine impulses. It comforts life, as the shower comforts the parched grass; and penetrates into the very recesses of our being, as the juices and fluids penetrate the arteries and pores of the plant.
There is so much practicality in our American life, that we are in danger of growing sordid, covetous, unsympathetic, unpoetical; and our lives threaten to be as barren of beauty as the pile of unhewn marble, out of which the glorious edifice can be built, if only the hand of the master touches it, and molds it into forms of unity and grace. We want the hand of that master to seize our being, to give it symmetry, to develop its latent glories, to prove its power for developing a fair humanity. The Master already is at the door!
In the cultivation of a taste for music, flowers, and home ornamentation, for art and poetry, for female purity and spiritual grace, we find the means of a right development. These are the messengers of the beautiful, and by their guidance we approach the true shrine.
It is one of the most cheering signs of our civilization, that a taste for music and art is fast spreading among all classes of the American people. Pictures and books are now found in houses where, a few years since, they were utter strangers, and their introduction has caused such a delightful change! That once hard repulsive room is now pleasant, and grace sits at the door. What has wrought the change. A picture or two on the walls, a carpet on the bare floor, a fine book upon the table—these are the secret of the new order which reigns there. And as the taste for these things expands, there will be still more beauty around that house. Vines will creep over the door, the yard will be turned into form and shape, a piano will enter over the door-sill, and "send its wild echoes flying" through all the rooms to make hearts beat with new emotions. Then must follow that intelligence which has the truest appreciation of life, which sees something else in existence than the mere necessities of subsistence, which finds in nature a language before dead, or unmeaning.
A young man should lend himself to think and talk of art, of music, etc., etc.; should visit picture galleries and libraries; should attend good lectures and good concerts, and thus to acquire a taste for such recreation, to fill his mind with good thoughts, and to start in his soul noble aspirations. He who pursues this course, and leaves to others the bar-room, the billiard-room, the race-course, the club-room, is as sure of a high reward, as that intellect and virtue are above mere physical enjoyment and grossness.
Without doubt, the worst enemy of the young man is the drinking and smoking saloon. While we make no pretensions to total abstinence in the use of spirits, we still believe, from a long experience and close observation, that a bar-room resort is that fatal "first step," which starts the career of dissipation, debauchery, and crime. The associations one meets there, the whole moral atmosphere and presence, are deadening to right principles, destructive of right impressions. Beware of them, O young man, is the earnest admonition we have to give to him who peruses this little chapter.
A good antidote to the bad habit of frequenting these too-common places of resort, is to seek the society of intelligent, virtuous females; to go out with them, to sing with them, read with them, talk with them. A true woman's influence is ennobling, and she truly is the director of our race, if we but allow her her real rights to our devotion and our trust.