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Dividend Two Directory 05
Page 04
Gerard Terburg, whose pictures now have an enormous value, had two sisters, Maria and Gezina, whose genre pictures were not unworthy of comparison with the works of their famous brother. Gottfried Schalken, remarkable for his skill in the representation of scenes by candle light, was scarcely more famous than his sister Maria. Eglon van der Neer is famous for his pictures of elegant women in marvellous satin gowns. He married Adriana Spilberg, a favorite portrait painter. The daughters of the eminent engraver Cornelius Visscher, Anna and Maria, were celebrated for their fine etching on glass, and by reason of their poems and their scholarly acquirements they were called the "Dutch Muses," and were associated with the learned men of their day. This list, though incomplete, suggests that the co-education of artists bore good fruit in their co-operation in their profession.
The liquid kindling of the twilight, the western glow of clearburning fires, bringing no weariness of heat but the exquisite coolness of darkling airs, is of all the ceremonial of the day the most solemn and sacred moment. The dawn has its own splendours, but it brightens out of secret mists and folded clouds into the common light of day, when the burden must be resumed and the common business of the world renewed again. But the sunset wanes from glory and majesty into the stillness of the star-hung night, when tired eyes may close in sleep, and rehearse the mystery of death; and so the dying down of light, with the suspension of daily activities, is of the nature of a benediction. Dawn brings the consecration of beauty to a new episode of life, bidding the soul to remember throughout the toil and eagerness of the day that the beginning was made in the innocent onrush of dewy light; but when the evening comes, the deeds and words of the daylight are irrevocable facts, and the mood is not one of forward-looking hope and adventure, but of unalterable memory, and of things dealt with so and not otherwise, which nothing can henceforward change or modify. If in the morning we feel that we have power over life, in the evening we know that, whether we have done ill or well, life's power over ourselves has been asserted, and that thus and thus the record must stand.
In philology, North America presents the richest field in the world, for here is found the greatest number of languages distributed among the greatest number of stocks. As the progress of research is necessarily from the known to the unknown, civilized languages were studied by scholars before the languages of savage and barbaric tribes. Again, the higher languages are written and are thus immediately accessible. For such reasons, chief attention has been given to the most highly developed languages. The problems presented to the philologist, in the higher languages, cannot be properly solved without a knowledge of the lower forms. The linguist studies a language that he may use it as an instrument for the interchange of thought; the philologist studies a language to use its data in the construction of a philosophy of language. It is in this latter sense that the higher languages are unknown until the lower languages are studied, and it is probable that more light will be thrown upon the former by a study of the latter than by more extended research in the higher.
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