is one of the fine arts, and by looking upon it as such, you may cultivate your taste and discrimination to an extent you little dream of. Imagination is the marriage of Thought and Affection, and the Fine Arts are its first-born children, and represent humanity in all its phases more fully and truly than any other department of art or science. What we know as the useful arts, which are born of man's love for physical ease and pleasure, are of comparatively modern date; but history goes not back to the time when the mind of man first took delight in fashioning and admiring the products of the fine arts. Many suppose them God-given and coeval with the birth of man. Music, painting, sculpture, poetry, and romance are the five departments of the fine arts. When these are studied and loved merely for amusement, they are of little or no use; if they are made vehicles for filling the mind with impure and evil images, they are shocking abuses; but if they subserve pure and holy purposes, elevating the soul towards all that is beautiful and good, they are true Apostles of the Word. Their ministrations are almost if not quite universal. It would be hard to find a human being whose soul is not stirred by one or other of them. Comparatively few persons have it in their power to enjoy the delight and the refining influence that are derived from the highest exhibitions of skill in those departments of the fine arts that address themselves to the eye and the ear; but poetry and romance, the most intellectual and the most varied of them all, are accessible to every one. As those blessings that are far off and difficult to be attained are usually those which are most highly prized, we often find persons sighing for the culture to be obtained from music, painting, and sculpture, and overlooking or undervaluing the higher culture to be derived from poetry and romance. The best gifts of Heaven are always those which are most universal. Let any one read the plays of Shakespeare, the poems of Milton, and the novels of Scott carefully and critically as he would study a gallery of pictures, and he will find his taste refined and elevated as much as it could be by a visit to the Vatican. The genius of these authors is to the full as high and noble and original as that of Raphael, Angelo, or Titian. The means of culture are not far-fetched and dear-bought. They lie around us everywhere, and to make use of them is a luxurious recreation of the mind. What mother, wearied and worn by the cares of maternity, what laborer, exhausted with toil, what student, faint with striving for fame, but would be refreshed and renewed for the warfare of life by forgetting it all for a little while in the realms of the ideal world?