When, in the fable of The Two Pigeons, he said: 

    “Absence is the greatest of ills, ... 
      Not so for you, cruel one!”

He discovered shades, hitherto unknown, with which to paint reproach mingled with grief.  And when he said: 

    “The ant ... is not a lender!...”

A more affirmative and striking sense of the character attributed to our thrifty friend, was detached from this delay, filled up by a negative movement of the narrator’s head.

If Delsarte had limited himself in his lectures, to teaching men by means of the menagerie, which was a sly burlesque of the courtiers of Louis XIV., perhaps he might have made idolatrous partisans there as elsewhere; but it seems as if in the exposition of his theory, he posed rather as a censor than a teacher; he delighted in baffling the mind by paradoxes.  By annexes superimposed and ill-blended with his system, he sometimes compromised those scientific truths whose splendor bursts forth when they are freed from heterogeneous accessories.  We cannot otherwise explain the resistance of certain minds, distinguished otherwise, to the recognition in him of the artist who excited the enthusiasm of all the most competent critics and brilliant amateurs.

Chapter VI.

The Law of AEsthetics.

However striking and superior the system of Francois Delsarte has been shown to be, however admirable and attractive the manifestation of art in his person,—­herein lie not his first rights to the grateful sympathy which we owe to his memory.  His works and discoveries in aesthetics are a benefit of general interest, while they disclose to us the fruitful resources of his genius.

In the first place, what is a law?  We have here to deal, not with the legislation decreed by man for the regulation of social and political relations, but with those laws deduced from a natural order, as the principle of life itself, which govern the relations of beings and of things.  In religion these laws are its dogmas and mysteries; philosophically speaking, the laws of things are the essentials of their nature, their specific relations.

Voltaire has written:  “Law is the instinct by which we feel justice.”  In Littre’s Dictionary we find stated that “laws are conditions imposed by circumstances.”  Another has said:  “The constant, uneludable succession in which phenomena occur, takes the name of law.”

I would here state, that in no one of the last three citations does the word “law” seem to me to be precisely defined.  From the different explanations of the natural laws which I have been able to compare, I conclude that laws are forces containing in themselves the reasons, to us unknown, of a power and permanence which are unchangeable.  Plato named them ideas.  We must now conclude that the nature of a law, in the present acceptation of the term, can be but imperfectly interpreted by exact formulae.  Laws are still much involved in the secrets of creation.  Here must we seek their origin or origins.