but we cannot afford it.'
Let us reason together. Can you not deduct something from your elaborate
furniture, your expensive dress, and devote it to models, lithographs,
or paintings? Subtract but the half from these luxuries and devote the
sum to designs of art, and you will contribute doubly to the
attractiveness and pleasantness of your home. Where we cannot hope to
possess the original masterpiece, we may have photographic or
lithographic copies, which are within the compass of very humble means.
You will freely toss away five dollars in useless embroidery or surplus
furniture, and it would buy you a lithograph of Raphael's immortal
picture, giving the results of a whole age of artistic culture, or a
photograph of Cheney's Madonna and Child, bearing the very spirit of the
original, or a plaster cast of noble statuary, the original of which
could not be obtained for any namable sum--and yet you say you cannot
afford works of art!

There is surely nothing you can afford better than to make your home
attractive, and to introduce therein every available means of mental and
moral culture. If you cannot afford to make home lovely, others will
succeed in making dangerous places attractive to your children. There
are spots enough kept light and picturesque, perilously fascinating to
those whose homes boast no attractions. It will likely cost you far more
in money, more surely in heart-anguish and sorrow, to have your children
entertained in these places full of snares, where corrupt art lavishes
her designs with unsparing hand, to vitiate the young imagination and
debase the mind, than to exalt her in her chaste and ennobling power in
the sanctuary of your homes, as one of the means of home-culture,
stimulating to virtue and stamping the character with genuine worth.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4,
October, 1864, by Various

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CONTINENTAL MONTHLY ***

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