Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/653

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since it can educate a sensibility for other forms of beauty besides its own. The genius of a Ruskin can quicken our feeling for masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, and painting. Even a very limited study of literature, if it be only of the right quality, may provide permanent springs of refreshment for those whose principal studies and occupations are other than literary. We may recall here some weighty words written by one of the very greatest of modern men of science. "If I had to live my life again," said Charles Darwin, "I would have made it a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week....The loss of these tastes 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 same lesson is enforced by John Stuart Mill, in that remarkable passage of his Autobiography where he describes how, while still a youth, he became aware of a serious defect, a great lacuna, in that severe intellectual training which, for him, had commenced in childhood. It was a training from which the influences of imaginative literature had been rigidly excluded. He turned to that literature for mental relief, and found what he wanted in the poetry of Wordsworth. "I had now learned by experience"—this is his comment—"that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities, and required to be nourished and enriched as well as guided." Nor is it merely to the happi-