poetry and the arts, the offspring of the beautiful,—­and who can have no other parentage,—­had established themselves in the modern European mind, and have since, with varying vigor of life, upheld themselves among Christian nations.  To these they are now confined.  In the most advanced of Mahometan and heathen peoples sensibility to beauty is hardly awakened, and among savages it seems scarcely to exist, so deeply is it dormant.

Thus to indicate when and by whom the beautiful has been recognized will further us in the endeavor to learn wherein consists that which, enriching the world of man so widely and plenteously, is deeply enjoyed by so few.

Were the beautiful, like size and shape and strength and nimbleness, cognizable by intellectual perception, even the Hottentot would get to know something of it in the forest, along with the grosser qualities of trees and valleys.  Were it liable to be seized by the discursive and ratiocinative intellect, the most eminent statesman or lawyer or general would excel too in the capacity to appreciate beauty; the Roman would have shone in arts as in arms; the Spartan would not have been so barren where the Athenian was so prolific.  But beauty is felt, not intellectually apprehended or logically deduced.  Its presence is acknowledged by a gush from the soul, by a joyous sentimental recognition, not by a discernment of the understanding.  When we exclaim, How beautiful! there is always emotion, and delightful, expansive, purifying emotion.  Whence this mysterious cleansing thrill?  Thence, that the recognition of beauty ever denotes, ever springs out of, sympathy with the creative spirit whence all things have their being.

The beautiful, then, is not subject to the intellect.  We cannot demonstrate or coldly discover it; we cannot weigh or measure it.  Further to illustrate this position:  we do not see with our outward eye any more than we do with spectacles.  The apparent ocular apparatus is but the passive, unconscious instrument to transmit images thrown through it upon a fine interior fibre, the optic nerve; and even this does not take cognizance of the object, but is only another conductor, carrying the image still farther inward, to the intellectual nerves of the brain; and not until it reaches them do we see the object, not until then is its individuality and are its various physical qualities, size, shape, etc., apprehended.  And now the intellect itself becomes a conductor, transmitting still deeper inward to the seat of emotion the image of the object; and not until it reaches that depth is its beauty recognized.

In all her structures and arrangements Nature is definite, precise, and economical.  In subdivision of labor she is minute and absolute, providing for every duty its special exclusive agent.  In the mind there is as severe a sundering of functions as in the body, and the intellect can no more encroach upon or act for the mental sensibilities than the stomach can at need perform the office of the heart, or the liver that of the lungs.  True, no ripe results in the higher provinces of human life can be without intimate alliance between the mental sensibilities and the intellect; nevertheless they are in essence as distinct from one another as are the solar heat and the moisture of the earth, without whose constant cooeperation no grain or fruit or flower can sprout or ripen.