Atlantic essays Author:Thomas Wentworth Higginson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: would not prefer poorer lodgings and better museums ? I remember that, many years since, in a crowded country- house, I slept one night on the floor beneath Retz... more »sch's copy of the Sistine Madonna, — then perhaps the loveliest work of art on this continent. As I lay and watched the silent moonbeams enter and rest upon the canvas, I felt that my share of the hospitality was, after all, the best. The couch might be comfortless, but the dreams were divine. It is such a hospitality that one wishes, after all, from the age in which he lives. Culture is the training and finishing of the whole man, until he sees physical demands to be merely secondary, and pursues science and art as objects of intrinsic worth. It undoubtedly places the fine arts above the useful arts, in a certain sense, and is willingly impoverished in material comforts, if it can thereby obtain nobler living. When this impulse takes the form 'of a reactionary distrust of the whole spirit of the age, it is unhealthy and morbid. In its healthy form, it simply keeps alive the conviction that the life is more than meat; and so supplies that counterpoise to mere wealth which Europe vainly seeks to secure by aristocracies of birth. So far as our colleges go, what is needed seems tolerably plain. (Our educational system requires a process of addition, not of subtraction; not to save our children from the painful necessity of studying this or that, but to gain for thenrthe opportunity of studying that and more, in their own way.N The demand for higher education outruns the supply. This is proved by the palpable fact, - that more and more pupils are sent to Europe for instruction, every year; and more from the Western States than from the Eastern. There are more and more young men of fortune whose parents will not stint the...« less