those which give pleasure to taste and imagination; whether that pleasure arise from sublimity, from beauty in its different forms, from design and art, from moral sentiment, from novelty, from harmony, from wit, humor, and ridicule.' The subject of literary beauty has been abundantly illustrated in this and preceding chapters. Shakespeare, Milton, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Scott, Shelley, Keats, Irving, Hawthorne, Tennyson, George Eliot, and Ruskin, are a notable few of the many whose pictures. enrich the great art-gallery of English letters. Artists of the beautiful are they all, loving and delicate.

When beauty is joined with sadness or sorrow, we have pathos, a word that, derived from the Greek nałɛīv, primarily meant to suffer, and implied vehemence; but has now grown to mean that which awakens tender emotions, chiefly those of humane and hearty sympathy. Dickens' description of the death of little Nell in Old Curiosity Shop is a good example. Only reminding you of Keats' exquisite lines on the marble figures of the Grecian urn, we cite from the Pleasures of Hope the following:

Hark, the wild maniac sings to chide the gale
That wafts so slow her lover's distant sail; .
Oft when yon moon has climbed the midnight sky
And the lone sea-bird wakes its wildest cry,

Piled on the steep, her blazing fagots burn

To hail the bark that never can return:

And still she waits, but scarce forbears to weep,
That constant love can linger on the deep.

The pathetic is commensurate with literature itself, and nowhere is it more strikingly present than in Ecclesiastes, the Book of Job, and the penitential Psalms. It was the Hebraic race that taught, 'By the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better,' and 'Better is the house of mourning than the house of mirth.' No quality of literature is profounder, holier, more purifying, more elevating, more enduring.

When beauty is sought by the disposal of heterogeneous elements in such a manner as to produce, on the whole, the effect of beautiful wildness- the appearance of being wildly free from rules, we have the picturesque, which, as an acknowledged element of art, was born in the contrasts of mediæval times, when the fragments and ruins of ancient things were gradually grouping themselves together with the new and still half-savage, into something like unity. Gnarled oaks, ruined towers in forest depths, old and abandoned mills, with the fruitless stream still slipping through the worn wheel, Gothic cathedrals, tempest-worn, perhaps overgrown in part with moss or ivy, may be offered as instances. In literature, illustrations may be found, among other places, in the feudal romances and in Marmion.

The primitive of beauty means good. With the Greek, the perfect fair, the ideal of human aspiration, was the beautiful and good — τὸ καλὸν κἀγαθόν. From the days of Plato, the good, the true, and the beautiful, have been accepted as the all-comprehensive ideas. Philosophers and poets have regarded them as standing in very close relationship to one another, differing rather in their mode of expression and in the relations they sustain to us, than in essence. It is in this spirit that Whittier says:

The good is always beautiful, the beautiful is good.

And Keats:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Likewise Akenside:

Truth and good are one,

And beauty dwells in them, and they in her,
With like participation.

'If,' says Cousin, 'the true, the good, and the beautiful appear to be distinct and separate, it is not because they are so in fact, but because they are given forth [with

different relative prominence] in different objects.' Yet, whatever may be their ultimate and real character, whether of kinship or of oneness, they differ in aspect. A homely face may be endeared to us by its light of genius, its glow of sympathy, and loveliness of heart, but we shall not be brought to pronounce it, in itself, beautiful, though attractive. The good, again, proposes an end to be accomplished, and involves the idea of moral obligation, while the beautiful proposes no end, carries no obligation, but is purely free and spontaneous. The true is addressed, not to the senses, but to the reason.

One of the most remarkable things in the world is the abundance of beauty of what not only serves material needs, but feeds and comforts the finer and nicer faculties of man. The commonest things are adorned, not with ornament that is put on, but with that which grows out of their substance, which affects their form and shines through every lineament:

Therefore on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'erdarkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the midforest brake
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read;
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.-Keats.

Only to spirit can spirit be intelligible. The shining of the Eternal-its richness, nobleness, purity, will be lost upon us, without an inward appetite therefor. To find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, else a world-wide search will not discover it. To the unkindled mind the face of nature is darkness, and art is void of charm. 'He,' says Lord Jeffery, 'will always see the most beauty whose affections are warmest and most exercised, whose imagination is the most powerful, and who has the most accustomed himself to attend to the objects by which he is surrounded.' To a Wordsworth, the meanest thing that grows gives thoughts too deep for tears.

Sensibility to the beautiful— competence to feel the invisible in the visible, is a liberalizing and civilizing power. The more of it, as thus defined, is ever the more of the true. The higher and more varied its culture, the more is the culture of the intellect drawn in and constrained. Its stimulating sunshine refines, purifies, and expands the moral feelings also, just as companionship with the ugly, false, and vicious, corrupts, stupefies, and degrades them. To the action of every other faculty it imparts vividness and grace. Highly gifted with it, men become creative, upborne and inspired by the ideal, which burns as a transfiguring flame. Without it, science is cramped and poor, religion is narrow, life unripened and fractional.

The nature of man, indeed, from childhood, and from the humblest conditions, seems, as it were, ever to cry aloud for some sign or token of what is beautiful in some of the many spheres of mind or sense. But too often the fructifying instinct languishes and dies, because overlaid by the nicknacks and other rubbish of Vanity Fair, because of the too hard stress of bodily want, or the pressure of excessive business. Men postpone their manhood till they have an estate, then find that the estate rides them. They

eat and drink, that they may afterward execute the ideal. 'Would it not be better,' says Emerson, 'to begin higher up,- to serve the ideal before they eat and drink, to serve the ideal in eating and drinking, in drawing the breath, and in the functions of life? Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten. If history were truly told, if life were nobly spent, it would be no longer easy or possible to distinguish the one from the other. In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful.'