To the action of every other faculty this one gives vividness and grace.  It indues each with privilege of insight into the soul of the object which it is its special office to master.  By help of sensibility to the beautiful we have inklings of the essence of things, we sympathize with the inward life that molds the outward form.  Hence men highly gifted with this sensibility become creative, in whatever province of work they strive; and no man in any province is truly creative except through the subtle energy imparted to him by this sensibility, this competence to feel the invisible in the visible.

The idea is the invisible; the embodiment thereof is the visible.  Hence the beautiful is always ideal; that is, it enfolds, embraces, represents, with more or less success, the idea out of which springs the object it illuminates:  it brilliantly enrobes a germinal essence.  It is thus a sparkling emanation out of the Infinite, and it leads us thither whence it has come.

Sensibility to the beautiful is thus the light of the whole mind, illuminating its labors.  Without it we work in the dark, and therefore feebly, defectively.  Infer thence the immensity of its function.  Hereby it becomes the chief educator of men and of man; and where its teaching has not been conspicuous, there no elevation has been reached.  The Greeks and the Hebrews would not have been so deeply, so greatly, so feelingly known to us, would not have been the pioneers and inspirers of European civilization, would not have lived on through thousands of years in the minds of the highest men, had they not, along with their other rare endowments, possessed, in superior, in unique quality, this priceless gift of sensibility to the beautiful.  Through this gift Shakespeare is the foremost man of England, and through it has done more than any other man to educate and elevate England.  Because the Italians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were so rich in this gift, therefore it is that Italy is still a shrine to which the civilized world makes annual pilgrimage.

The supreme function of this sensibility is to develop, to educate, to chasten the highest faculties, our vast discourse of reason, our unselfish aspiration, our deep instinct of truth, our capacious love.  To educate these is its cardinal duty, and lacking this they remain uneducated.  But its beneficent influence is felt likewise in the less elevated of our efforts.  The man who makes shoes, as well as he who makes laws and he who makes poems; the builder of houses, with the builder of theologies or cosmogonies; the engineer, as well as the artist, all work under the rays of this illuminator; and, other things being equal, he excels all others on whose work those rays shine with the most sustained and penetrative force.

              “’T is the eternal law,
  That first in beauty shall be first in might."[2]

[2] Keats.

In short, whatever the mental gift, in order to get from that gift its best fruit, the possessor must be incited, upborne, enlightened, inspired by the ideal, which burns as a transfiguring flame in his mind, and throws thence its joyful light with every blow of his hand.