And this condition is likely to increase rather than diminish as time goes on, until, having finally arrived at moments of leisure and finding that neither our money nor any other material possession gives us any deep or permanent satisfaction, we turn to beauty only to be confronted with the old warning: “Too late, ye cannot enter now.” For we have arrived at the time when, in Meredith’s phrase, “Nature stops, and says to us, ‘Thou art now what thou wilt be.’” For this capacity for understanding and loving great books and paintings and music has to grow with our own growth and cannot be postponed to another season. The average American man is supposed to have no time for these things. He has time, but he refuses to turn it into leisure,--leisure which means contemplation and thoughtfulness,--though he very likely knows that this has been accomplished over and over again by men who have saved out of a busy life for that purpose a little time every day. One recalls Darwin’s pathetic statement wherein he describes his early love for poetry and music, and the final complete loss of those “capabilities” through neglect. “The loss of these tastes,” he says, “is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” The intellect of man, in itself, is never supreme or sufficient. Feeling or instinct is half of knowledge. “Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy,” says Whitman, “walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.” Of any man, American or otherwise, who lives his life unmindful of all beauty we may justly say, as Carlyle said of Diderot, “He dwelt all his days in a thin rind of the Conscious; the deep fathomless domain of the Unconscious whereon the other rests and has its meaning was not under any shape surmised by him.” Must not the education of children in beauty begin, then, with their parents? Must they not be aroused, at least, to an _intellectual_ conviction of its value, even though they have missed its joy? Can the matter be safely left to the jurisdiction of the schools themselves whose curricula are already overcrowded with methods of escape from this very thing? Does not the school answer the general conception of education obtaining among the fathers and mothers of the school-children? Can it be expected--is it possible for it--to rise far above that conception? My object is therefore to suggest, first, that the perception of beauty is, in the highest sense, education; second, that music is especially so, because it is the purest form of beauty; and, third, that music is the only form of beauty by means of which very young children can be educated, because it is the only form accessible to them.