The value of beauty is disregarded, and the
cultivation of the sense of beauty is treated as of little worth,
compared with the culture of what are styled the practical faculties.
Our wealth is spent in the erection of extravagant stores and
shops,--in the decoration of oyster-saloons, hotels, and
steamboats,--in the lavish and selfish adornment of drawing-rooms and
chambers. In the whole breadth of the continent there is not a single
building of such beauty as to be an object of national pride, and few
which will have any value in future times, except as historic records
of the poverty of sentiment and the deficiency of character of the men
of this generation.
Our oldest and best endowed University has, like Oxford, lately engaged
in the erection of a Museum, which, though more limited in its general
object, has yet a scope of such large and generous proportion as to
make it a work of even more than national interest. It is undertaken on
such a scale as to fit it not merely for present needs, but for the
increasing wants of later times.
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