Only by spirit can spirit be greeted.
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.
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