mind was further illuminated by that mysterious, visionary, titanic, Teutonic epic, the Niebelungen Lied; and a little later appeared the troubadours in the south of Europe and the minnesingers (love-singers) in Germany. Next came Dante and Giotto in Italy, then Chaucer in England; so that by the end of the fourteenth century, poetry and the arts, the offspring of the beautiful,—and who can have no other parentage,—had established themselves in the modern European mind, and have since, with varying vigor of life, upheld themselves among Christian nations. To these they are now confined. In the most advanced of Mahometan and heathen peoples sensibility to beauty is hardly awakened, and among savages it seems scarcely to exist, so deeply is it dormant.

Thus to indicate when and by whom the beautiful has been recognized will further us in the endeavor to learn wherein consists that which, enriching the world of man so widely and plenteously, is deeply enjoyed by so few.

Were the beautiful, like size and shape and strength and nimbleness, cognizable by intellectual perception, even the Hottentot would get to know something of it in the forest, along with the grosser qualities of trees and valleys. Were it liable to be seized by the discursive and ratiocinative intellect, the most eminent statesman or lawyer or general would excel too in the capacity to appreciate beauty; the Roman would have shone in arts as in arms; the Spartan would not have been so barren where the Athenian was so prolific. But beauty is felt, not intellectually apprehended or logically deduced. Its presence is acknowledged by a gush from the soul, by a joyous sentimental recognition, not by a discernment of the understanding. When we exclaim, How beautiful! there is always emotion, and delightful, expansive, purifying emotion. Whence this mysterious cleansing thrill? Thence, that the recognition of beauty ever denotes, ever springs out of, sympathy with the creative spirit whence all things have their being.

The beautiful, then, is not subject to the intellect. We cannot demonstrate or coldly discover it; we cannot weigh or measure it. Further to illustrate this position: we do not see with our outward eye any more than we do with spectacles. The apparent ocular apparatus is but the passive, unconscious instrument to transmit images thrown through it upon a fine interior fibre, the optic nerve; and even this does not take cognizance of the object, but is only another conductor, carrying the image still farther inward, to the intellectual nerves of the brain; and not until it reaches them do we see the object, not until then is its individuality and are its various physical qualities, size, shape, etc., apprehended. And now the intellect itself becomes a conductor, transmitting still deeper inward to the seat of emotion the image of the object; and not until it reaches that depth is its beauty recognized.

In all her structures and arrangements Nature is definite, precise, and economical. In subdivision of labor she is minute and absolute, providing for every duty its special exclusive agent. In the mind there is as severe a sundering of functions as in the body, and the intellect can no more encroach upon or act for the mental sensibilities than the stomach can at need perform the office of the heart, or the liver that of the lungs. True, no ripe results in the higher provinces of human life can be without intimate alliance between the mental sensibilities and the intellect; nevertheless they are in essence as distinct from one another as are the solar heat and the moisture of the earth, without whose constant coöperation no grain or fruit or flower can sprout or ripen.

We live not merely in a world of material facts, and of objects and things cognizable through the senses, but also in a spiritual world. We live not only in presence of visible creation, but in presence of the invisible Creator. With the creation we are in contact through the intellect. Knowledge of all objects and the qualities of objects that are within reach of the senses; distance and other material relations; the bonds of cause and effect and of analogy, that bind all created things in countless multiplicity of subtle relations,—these the intellect gathers in its grasp. But with the Creator we are in communication only through feeling. The presence, the existence of God cannot by pure intellect be demonstrated: it must be felt in order to be proved. The mass of objects and relations presented to us in nature the intellect can learn, count, and arrange; but the life that incessantly permeates the whole and every part, the spirit that looks out from every object and every fact,—of the range and pitch of whose power we have a faint token in the tornado and the earthquake,—of this divine essence we should not have even an intimation through the intellect alone. Not chemists, astronomers, mechanicians have uttered the deepest thoughts about God, but prophets and poets: not Davys, but Coleridges; not Herschels, but Wordsworths. It is a common belief, indeed, that men addicted to the exact sciences are rather wanting than otherwise in power to appreciate the invisible, a belief pungently embodied by Wordsworth in the lines,—

This is as much under the mark as is above it that saying of some one, “An undevout astronomer is mad.” A man’s being endowed with rare mathematical talent is no cause why he should or should not be devout. His gifts to weigh and measure the stars are purely intellectual; and nature being seldom profuse upon one individual,—as she was upon Pascal and Newton,—the presumption as to an astronomer, of whom we know nothing, would be that what may be termed his emotive appreciation of stars and stellar systems is probably not so full as his intellectual. And no amount or quality of intellectual insight can supply or compensate a want of sensibility. No matter how many hundreds of millions of miles he may pierce into space, he has still to do with the visible and calculable. But religion is the putting of the human mind in relation with the invisible, the incalculable. A man gets no nearer to God through a telescope than through a microscope, and no nearer through either than through the naked eye. Who cannot recognize the divine spirit in the hourly phenomena of nature and of his own mind will not be helped by the differential calculus, or any magnitude or arrangement of telescopic lenses.

That we ever live not only in a material, but also in a spiritual world, can be easily apprehended without at all entangling ourselves in the web-work of metaphysics. The least of our acts or motions, is it not always preceded by a thought, a volition, a something intangible, invisible? All that we voluntarily do is, must be, an offspring of mind. The waving of the hand is never a simple, it is a compound process: mind and body, spirit and matter, concur in it. The visible, corporeal movement is but the outward expression of an inward, incorporeal movement. And so in all our acts and motions, from birth till death; they issue out of the invisible within us; they are feelings actualized, thoughts embodied. The embodiment is perishable, the source of it imperishable. It is not a recondite, super-subtle, metaphysical or psychological postulate, it is a palpable, and may be and ought to be a familiar fact, that each one of us is ruled by the eternal and invisible within us.

Now, just as our words and deeds and movements stand to our mind, as being the utterance and embodiment of that, so do we stand towards Deity, being the utterance and embodiment of the divine thought and will. As all our doings are but exhibitions of our minds, so ourselves are manifestations of God. Through all things shines the eternal soul. The more perfect the embodiment, the more translucent is the soul; and when this is most transparent,