" And
Schelling, in his profound treatise on "The Relation of the Plastic
Arts to Nature," says, "The beautiful is beyond form; it is substance,
the universal; it is the look and expression of the spirit of
Nature." Were it not better and more precise to say that it is to us
the look and expression of the spiritual when this is peering through
choicest embodiments? But we will stop with definitions. After
endeavoring, by means of sentences and definitions to get a notion of
the beautiful, one is tempted to say, as Goethe did when "the idea of
the Divinity" was venturously mentioned to him by Eckermann, "Dear
child, what know we of the idea of the Divinity? and what can our
narrow ideas tell of the Highest Being? Should I, like a Turk, name it
with a hundred names, I should still fall short, and, in comparison
with the infinite attributes, have said nothing."
We have called the beautiful the light of the mind; but there must be
mind to be illuminated. If your torch be waved in a chamber set round
with bits of granite and slate and pudding-stone, you will get no
luminous reverberation. But brandish it before rubies and emeralds and
diamonds! The qualities in the mind must be precious, in order that
the mind become radiant through beauty.
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