These are familiar truths.  Like

  “The stretched metre of an antique song,”

they flow from our grateful lips in ready words.  But we do not suspect how these manifestations of material Beauty are received by the mysterious alembic of the soul,—­how they are worked up there by exquisite and subtile processes of moral chemistry, humanized, spiritualized, and appropriated unconsciously to sweet uses of piety and affection.  We do not know how the star, the flower, the dear human face, the movement of a wave, the song of a bird,—­we do not know how these things enter into the heart, become ideal, mingle with human emotions, consecrate and are consecrated, and come forth once more into light, but transfigured into tenderest sympathies and the gentle offices of charity and grace.  There was Wordsworth,—­he knew something of this still machinery, this “kiss of toothed wheels” within the soul of man.  Listen to him,—­he had been to Tintern Abbey and heard once more the “soft inland murmur” of the Wye;—­

            “These beauteous forms,
  Through a long absence, have not been to me
  As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: 
  But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din
  Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
  In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
  Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
  And passing even into my purer mind,
  With tranquil restoration:—­feelings, too,
  Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
  As have no slight or trivial influence
  On that best portion of a good man’s life,
  His little, nameless, unremembered acts
  Of kindness and of love.”

And then who that has ever read it can forget his exquisite picture in the “Education of a little Child"?—­

“And she shall lean her ear In many a secret place, Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty burn of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face!”

The material Beauty of the world, as exhibited in the manifold objects, sounds, perfumes, motions of Nature, is created for a nobler purpose than only to delight the senses and please the aesthetic faculties.  I believe it is the distant source whence flow all our dear daily affections.  We know, that, according to the suggestions of our merely human passions and instincts, we ease our hearts of Love by heaping treasures and the choicest gifts of fancy in the laps of those whom we most dearly cherish.  We take no credit to ourselves for such precious prodigalities; for they are the inevitable and disinterested outpourings of affection.  They are received as such.  And when we cast our eyes abroad and behold the loving prodigality of a divine hand, we accept the manifestation, are made happy in the consciousness of being beloved, and, constituted as we are in the image and likeness of God, express our instinctive gratitude in those fine human sympathies which impress the seal of Truth on the primary idea of our creation.