Thus beauty only becomes visible—­I might say only becomes actual—­by the fire kindled through the meeting of a perfection out of us and an inward appetite therefor.  And it is the flaming of this fire, thus kindled, that lights up to us the whole world wherein we live, the inward and the outward.  This fire unlighted, and on the face of nature there is darkness, in our own minds there is darkness.  For though all nature teems with the essence and the outward mold of beauty, to the unkindled mind beauty is no more present then was Banquo’s ghost to the guests of Macbeth.  Macbeth’s individual conscience made him see the ghost; nay, by a creative potency summoned it:  and so is beauty created there where, without what I may call the aesthetic conscience, it no more exists than do the glories of Titian and Claude to the affectionate spaniel who follows his master into a picture-gallery.  To the quadruped, by the organic limitation of his nature, dead forever is this painted life.  By the organic boundlessness of his nature, man can grasp the life of creation in its highest, its finest, its grandest manifestations; and from these beauty is indivisible.  Wherever the divine energy is most subtle and expressive, there glows ever, in its celestial freshness, the beautiful.

Beauty is the happiest marriage between the invisible and the visible.  It may be termed the joyfullest look of God.  Blessed is he who can watch and reflect this radiant look.  The faculties of such a one become fortified by creative influx.  Through the exquisite shock of the beautiful he reaps an accession of mental magnetism.  Thus through the beautiful we commune the most directly with the divine; and, other things being equal, to the degree that men respond to, are thrilled by, this vivacity of divine presence, as announced by the beautiful, to that degree are they elevated in the scale of being.

Nature being minute and absolute in subdivision of function, the law of severalty and independence—­than which there is no law more important and instructive—­pervades creation.  Thence the intellectual, the religious, the true, the good, cannot interchange functions.  A man may be sincerely religious and do little for others, as is seen in anchorites, and in many one-sided people, of Christian as well as of Mahometan parentage, who are not anchorites.  A man may be immensely intellectual and not value truth.  But neither a man’s intellect, nor his preference for truth, nor his benevolent nor his religious sentiment, can yield its best fruit without the sunshine of the beautiful.  Sensibility to the beautiful—­itself, like the others, an independent inward power—­stands to each one of them in a relation different from that which they hold one to the other.  The above and other faculties indirectly aid one the other, and to the complete man their united action is needed; but feeling for the beautiful directly aids each one, aids by stimulating it, by expanding, by purifying.