“On the city’s paved street
  Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet;
  Let spouting fountains cool the air,
  Singing in the sun-baked square;
  Let statue, picture, park, and hall,
  Ballad, flag, and festival
  The past restore, the day adorn,
  And make to-morrow a new morn!”

We have introduced into our schools, of late years, lessons in drawing, modelling, and designing,—­not sufficiently, but in a promising and hopeful way.  Emerson taught that it is the office of art to educate the perception of beauty; and he precisely describes one of the most recent of the new tendencies in American education and social life, when he says:  “Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten.”  That sentence is the inspiration of one of the most recent of the efforts to improve the arts and crafts, and to restore to society the artistic craftsman.  But how slow is the institutional realization of this ideal of art education!  We are still struggling in our elementary and secondary schools to get a reasonable amount of instruction in drawing and music, and to transfer from other subjects a fair allotment of time to these invaluable elements of true culture, which speak a universal language.  Yet the ultimate object of art in education is to teach men to see nature to be beautiful and at the same time useful, beautiful because alive and reproductive, useful while symmetrical and fair.  Take up to-day the last essays on education, the last book on landscape architecture, or the freshest teachings of the principles of design, and you will find them penetrated with Emerson’s doctrine of art as teacher of mankind.  Emerson insists again and again that true culture must open the sense of beauty; that “a man is a beggar who only lives to the useful.”  It will probably require several generations yet to induce the American people to accept his doctrine that all moments and objects can be embellished, and that cheerfulness, serenity, and repose in energy are the “end of culture and success enough.”

It has been clearly perceived of late that a leading object in education is the cultivation of fine manners.  On this point the teachings of Emerson are fundamental; but the American institutions of education are only beginning to appreciate their significance.  He teaches that genius or love invents fine manners, “which the baron and the baroness copy very fast, and by the advantage of a palace better the instruction.  They stereotype the lesson they have learned into a mode.”  There is much in that phrase, “by the advantage of a palace.”  For generations, American institutions of education were content with the humblest sort of shelters, with plain wooden huts and brick barracks, and unkempt grounds about the buildings.  They are only lately beginning to acquire fine buildings with pleasing surroundings; that is, they are just beginning to carry into practice