implied, but nowhere expressed; for Nature is unwearied in producing, but negligent of the product.  As soon as the end seems anywhere about to be attained, it is straightway made means again to something else, and so on forever.  The earth and the air hasten to convert themselves into a plant, the flower into fruit, the fruit into flesh, and the animal at last to die and give back again to the air and the earth what they have transmitted to him.  Whatever beauty a thing has is by the way, not as the end for which it exists, and so it is left to be baffled and soiled by accident.  This is the “jealousy of the gods,” that could not endure that anything should exist without some flaw of imperfection to confess its mortal birth.

The world is full of beauty, but as it were hinted,—­as in the tendency to make the most conspicuous things the most beautiful, as flowers, fruits, birds, the insects of the sunshine, the fishes of the surface, the upper side of the leaf; and perhaps more distinctly (in accordance with Lord Bacon’s suggestion that “Nature is rather busy not to err, than in labor to produce excellency”) in the tendency to hide those that are ugly, as toads, owls, bats, worms, insects that flee the light, the fishes of the bottom, the intestines of animals.  But these are hints only, and Nature, as Mr. Ruskin confesses, will sometimes introduce “not ugliness only, but ugliness in the wrong place.”  Were beauty the aim, it should be most evident in her chief products; whereas it is in things transient, minute, subordinate,—­flowers, snow-flakes, the microscopic details of structure,—­that it meets us most invariably, rather than in the higher animals or in man.  Nor in man does it keep pace with his civilization, but obeys laws that belong to the lower regions of his nature.

This ambiguity of every fact in Nature comes from the difficulty of detecting its true connection.  There is reality there, even in blight and corruption; something is forwarded, only perhaps not the thing before us,—­as the virtue of the compost-heap appears not in it, but in the rose-bed.  The artist cannot forego a jot of reality, but the obvious facts are not this, any more than the canvas and the pigment are the picture.  The prose of every-day life is reality in fragments,—­the Alps split into paving-stones,—­Achilles with a cold in the head.  Seen in due connection, they make up the reality; but their prominence as they occur is casual and shifting, and the result dependent on the spectator’s power of discerning, amid the endless series in which they are involved, more or less of their vital relations.