Not a poor town window
Loves its sickliest planting,
But its wall speaks loftier truth than Babylon’s whole vaunting.”
So again Mr. Procter apostrophizes Nature in his “Song of the Snowdrop,” as having surely sent it forth alone to the cold and sullen season, like a thought at random thrown,—“sent it thus for some grave reason.
“If ’twere but to pierce the mind
With a single gentle thought,
Who shall deem thee hard or blind,
Who, that thou hast vainly wrought?”
Bishop Copleston, in his plea for a free cultivation of the poetic faculty, contends that its being entirely neglected must prove an irreparable injury to young minds—losing as they do that intellectual charm from which life borrows its loveliest graces: hence he takes exception to Locke’s expression, that educators should beware of making “anything a boy’s business but downright virtue.” Surely, argues his critic, the improvement of the faculties which God has implanted in us is itself a virtue: our attention may be given in undue measure to one, and so may violate that just harmony without which nothing is virtuous, nothing lovely. The faculty itself, which the philosopher seems to condemn, the divine claims to be one of the kindest gifts of heaven. And why, then, it is asked, should man be niggardly where Providence has been bountiful? “Why should he think scorn of that pleasant land, and undervalue those fair possessions, which were not thought beneath the care of the Almighty?” In the garden of Eden, we are reminded, was made to grow, not only what was good for food, but every tree also that was pleasant to the sight: and in that garden man was placed, to keep it, and to dress it.