st-driven chisel, as
distinctly as the edge of a common paving-stone.

180. Let me suggest to you, in conclusion, one most interesting point of
mental expression in these necessary aspects of finely executed
sculpture. I have already again and again pressed on your attention the
beginning of the arts of men in the make and use of the ploughshare.
Read more carefully--you might indeed do well to learn at once by
heart,--the twenty-seven lines of the Fourth Pythian, which describe the
ploughing of Jason. There is nothing grander extant in human fancy, nor
set down in human words: but this great mythical expression of the
conquest of the earth-clay, and brute-force, by vital human energy, will
become yet more interesting to you when you reflect what enchantment has
been cut, on whiter clay, by the tracing of finer furrows;--what the
delicate and consummate arts of man have done by the ploughing of
marble, and granite, and iron. You will learn daily more and more, as
you advance in actual practice, how the primary manual art of engraving,
in the steadiness, clearness, and irrevocableness of it, is the best
art-discipline that can be given either to mind or hand;[134] you will
recognize one law of right, pronouncing itself in the well-resolved work
of every age; you will see the firmly traced and irrevocable incision
determining not only the forms, but, in great part, the moral temper, of
all vitally progressive art; you will trace the same principle and power
in the furrows which the oblique sun shows on the granite of his own
Egyptian city,--in the white scratch of the stylus through the colour on
a Greek vase--in the first delineation, on the wet wall, of the groups
of an Italian fresco; in the unerring and unalterable touch of the great
engraver of Nueremberg,--and in the deep driven and deep bitten ravines
of metal by which Turner closed, in embossed limits, the shadows of the
Liber Studiorum.

Learn, therefore, in its full extent, the force of the great Greek word,
[Greek: charasso];--and, give me pardon--if you think pardon needed,
that I ask you also to learn the full meaning of the English word
derived from it. Here, at the Ford of the Oxen of Jason, are other
furrows to be driven than these in the marble of Pentelicus. The
fruitfullest, or the fatallest of all ploughing is that by the thoughts
of your youth, on the white field of its imagination. For by these,
either down to the disturbed spirit, "[Greek: kekoptai