Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/116

106 matured without any mathematical discipline, on the idea that this is only necessary for the mechanically scientific.

Before dismissing the subject of educating the eye to form, it is to be remembered, that modelling, as well as drawing, should be practised in all places of education.

After this preparation of body and mind, reading and writing should be taught at once, and in such a manner as to make our own language the &quot;open Sesame&quot; to all speech. At present, the American people—although a congeries, as it were, of all peoples—is comparatively dumb. In no country which is called civilized, are even the cultivated classes themselves so completely sequestrated to the use of one language. While its economical interests, as well as its intellectual necessities, cry out for a general facility in speaking foreign tongues, the system of language-teaching falls confessedly below that of other nations. In the schools of Holland, the children grow up, speaking with facility four languages,—English, German, French, and Dutch. But it begins to be seen, that there is a natural and intellectual philosophy of expression; and that a true philological art can be taught to every child who learns to read and write, that shall make the native tongue appreciated in all its deep significance, and prepare the mind for such a comparison of our own with other tongues, as shall immensely facilitate their acquisition; and this glossology, while it affords so great an incidental advantage, shall discipline the intellect, like the learning of any natural science; showing grammar and logic to be, not mere technics, but the forms of thought, and languages themselves to be nothing less than the monuments of the history of the human mind in its first intuitions