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Rh be found one of the missing links through whose agency this alliance between the spheres of beauty and utility is to be consummated. Milton speaks of "the glorious, the magnificent, uses which may be made of poetry both in divine and human things;" while Shelley characterized it as "a fountain for ever flowing with the waters of wisdom and delight." It becomes, therefore, a question of deep national interest to consider by what agencies these renovating and purifying influences may be diffused, and brought home to the heart of this great nation. From Greece, "the fountain of all instruction in matters of art," we may perhaps take a hint as to one large and important department of national education.

In this connection I am tempted to quote a passage from Grote's History of Greece, where, after alluding to the abundance in the productions of the tragic muse, at Athens, he proceeds:—"All this abundance founds its way to the minds of the great body of the citizens, not excepting even the poorest. So powerful a body of poetic influence has probably never been brought to act upon the emotions of any other population; and when we consider the extraordinary beauty of these immortal compositions, which first stamped tragedy as a separate department of poetry, and gave to it a dignity never since reached, we shall be satisfied that the tastes, the sentiments, and the intellectual standard of the Athenian multitude must have been sensibly improved and exalted by such lessons. The reception of such pleasures through the eye and