To do their best the moral feelings, too, need the light and inward
stimulus of the beautiful; but if these feelings are by nature
weak, no strength or intensity of the sense of beauty will have power
to get from a mind thus deficient high moral thought or action. If
there be present the accomplishment of verse, we shall have a Byron;
or, the other poetic gifts in full measure, with lack of this
accomplishment, and we may get a Beckford, who builds Fonthill Abbeys,
and with purity and richness of diction describes palaces, actual or
feigned, and natural scenery with picturesqueness and genial glow; or,
the intellectual endowments being mediocre, we shall have merely a man
of superficial taste; or, the moral regents being ineffective, an
intellectual sybarite, or a refined voluptuary. Like the sun, the
beautiful shines on healthful field and poisonous fen; and her warmth
will even make flowers to bloom in the fen, but it is not in her to
make them bear refreshing odors or nourishing fruit.
As men have body, intellect, and moral natures, so is there physical,
intellectual, and spiritual beauty, and each distinct from the others.
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