An easy induction would bring us to the same conclusion in regard to an absolute or inherent beauty; that it belongs only to moral sentiments and states. While,.on the one hand, the revelation of them is communicated through the medium of sense, still all mere outward sensations, all that are possible to the mere animal, are excluded; and, on the other, while only what is peculiar to the rational world, comes within the sphere of beauty, all mere rational abstractions, all pure intellectual states are also excluded; and an absolute objective beauty lies in the moral world. All such beauty is moral in its essential nature; and, so far as it is studied, it will exert on the admiring student, the influence-the assimilating and moulding influence, of a purely moral subject.1

If we pass now, to the other department of positive beauty, the separable and changing, as distinguished from the fixed and inherent, denominated grace, we perceive that inasmuch as it depends on motion, it implies necessarily a cause operating in time. Let us take, as before, for the investigation of its more precise moral bearings, an exemplification of grace in the sensible world, and in its lowest department. The wavy ascent of a sky-rocket produces within us the effect of grace. That the grace does not consist in the mere sensible impression, is plain from the fact that the eye of a child or of a brute even, may receive that as fully and perfectly as the eye of the aesthetic beholder. The sensible impression is but the medium of the effect of the grace, just as light is the medium of the sensation itself. It is not, further, the mere motion that produces the grace; for the heavy fall of the rocketstaff has no grace. There is something peculiar to that motion, which it belongs not to every kind of motion to express. mere power which all motion expresses, but which still none but the eye of reason can discern in any motion, is not the source of the emotion of grace. It is the freedom, with which the power seems to act, which is the object of the emotion; that attribute which essentially characterizes a moral being, and is most perfect in the most perfect moral state. Yet is it not, so to speak, blind arbitrary freedom; it is not the freedom of caprice; it is the freedom of reason. In other words, in all expressions of grace, wherever found in nature, or in its own proper moral field, there is ever represented the presence of a power working freely, yet rationally, or in reference to an end. There is no grace in the irregular leaps of a witch-quill. But in the continued upward flight of the rocket, there is apparent progress towards a destined end; while at the same time, the easy wavings seem to indicate freedom from

The

1 Grecian Art, at its perfect stage, was exclusively elevating and purifying in its moral influence. Its subjects being, exclusively, of a pure æsthetic character in all departments of Art where the subject was free to the artist, as in painting and sculpture, and the expression of the subject being conformed to the most perfect æsthetic rules, it could have but one tendency and effect. It is mainly by the corruption of Art in the selection of low, immoral, and consequently un-æsthetic subjects, that Art came to be rather an auxiliary, than an antagonist to vice.

all outward constraint. It is the picture of a living thing, possessing freedom, directing its motions in compliance only with its own rational will. True, in this case, except on the theory which excludes the operation of second causes in the physical world, it is a kind of illusion. Yet is it to the sense the form which freedom, acting rationally, might present; and through the form, the rational eye discerns the reality represented; as the mere superficial forms of a picture, when the pencil of a Guido Reni has drawn in them the scene of the crucifixion, move our tears of sympathy and gratitude, as if the reality were before us; or as the mutterings of a maniac, repeating words which are to him unmeaning sounds. that have lost their significance, still carry to the rational listener, a sense which the wretched madman had not thought to put into his utterances. All grace in the physical world is, thus, the form caught up without the life, which an irrational nature repeats, and yet knows not what she utters. He that was made in the image of her Creator and fashioner, recognises its origin, however; to him even the dead form utters a living divine that has, at least, once animated it; and he yields with a ready pleasure to the sweet illusion.

The same conclusion would follow from examining an instance of the grace of repose. Although the result only of motion, it is yet only as the motion is recognised, that grace is discerned. The graceful composure of an infant's limbs in sleep, excites the idea of the previous grace of motion that has left its trace behind. We come, then, in this department of beauty, to the result at which we arrived in our consideration of fixed or absolute beauty:

ALL GRACE IS THE REVELATION OF MORAL FREEDOM,'

But grace is a higher department of beauty than the other; for it more directly and immediately reveals moral life. Grace implies at once the living person moving freely and rationally. It reveals a moral action; while fixed beauty expresses only a moral state. It has a more engaging charm. Absolute beauty fixes in mute admiration; in pleasing contemplation. Grace vanishes with a resistless attraction. According to the beautiful Grecian myth, the goddess of beauty charms only with her girdle of grace; with qualities of beauty which are not inherent, but only changing and separable from the wearer.2

The view here presented is conceived to be harmonious, or, rather, identical with that of Göthe, given in various of his writings, and summed up in the following of his aphorisms:

"Man is only many-sided," i. e. perfect as an artist, "when he strives after the highest, because he must (in earnestness), and descends to the lesser, when he will (i. e. to sportiveness)."

His demand, in perfect art, of the union of earnestness, seems to amount to nothing else, when strictly interpreted, than to a demand of freedom, working rationally, i. e. to a destined end. Perhaps, however, as perfect grace must ever be conformed to propriety, since perfect rational freedom must ever be conformed to truth, this element-propriety, may be regarded as included in his representation. ? See Schiller's Essay on Grace and Dignity.

The third department of beauty is propriety, or conformity to truth in artistic products. We need spend no time in showing the close alliance this sustains to morals. Indeed, when we undertake to explain the essence of abstract morality, the moral power itself, and the specific form of it being left out of view, we naturally fall upon terms identical, or synonymous with those by which we define artistic propriety, and all propriety, applied to art, which, as we have seen, lies in a moral, because æsthetic sphere, partakes itself of a moral character.

How essential propriety is, in all art, is obvious. Grace itself must conform to the prescriptions of propriety; and all absolute beauty lies bounded and moulded by the determining lines of propriety, just as all moral states are shaped harmoniously with truth. Just so far as propriety is violated, or seemingly so, the impressions of beauty are hindered. Thus the highest beauty becomes repulsive, if not disgusting, when out of place, out of time, out of character. Hence it is, that a training which is essentially moral in its character, which, in other words, habituates to a practical conformity to every behest of duty, is so indispensable in the accomplished artist.

From this consideration of the elements of objective beauty, it appears that the entire matter of æsthetics lies in the moral world. Beauty is, however, still distinguishable from morality or virtue. It is right revealed to sense. It is holiness, rectitude, purity, moral perfection, clad in its own proper vestment, embodied, rather, in its own proper form of sense, coming down into the sphere of man, and wooing to its embrace by its native charms made manifest to human sense. While it is not the essence, on the one hand, it is not the mere outward, dead form, on the other. It is the harmony of both; the harmony of sense and spirit. It constitutes precisely that sphere in which man must effect his transition from flesh to spirit; in which, on the one hand, the dominion of the flesh must be thrust off, and, on the other, the freedom of the spirit must be embraced.

Let not this nature of beauty be lost from view. We are prone to imagine the existence of a world of beauty, entirely distinct from the world of truth and reality. We are prone to conceive of a world of art, of imagination, entirely removed from the world of fact and reason. We thus separate beauty from truth, the form from the substance, neither of which can be without the other. And we are in danger of doing this, not only in our speculations, but also in our practice. We press our speculative analysis into the real concrete; and act as if virtue had no form of loveliness peculiar to itself, and necessary to its perfect existence, at least in this present world of sense; and, as if the lovely and graceful in life were a mere empty bubble, devoid of reality, fit, indeed, to amuse those who have leisure or capacity to be amused, but worth

less otherwise. This is a grand, pernicious, yet prevalent mistake. The consequence is, deformed, haggard asceticism and religious purism, on the one hand, and, on the other, vapid sentimentalism and heartless formalism. We may not hesitate, perhaps, if obliged to choose between these extremes. We may prefer the substance, haggard, misshapen, repulsive as it is, to mere outside. But they are extremes both. Neither can be perfect without the other; as there cannot be perfect vigor of intellect in an unsound body, nor a perfect human body without a healthy spirit to animate it.

Truth and beauty stand in this vital relation to each other, each implying the other, and distinguished only as the substance which ever involves the form, is prominent in our idea of the one, and the form which ever presupposes the substance, is prominent in our idea of the other. In a proper worship of truth, we do not, or need not reject her native form; in a proper homage to beauty, we need not reject its essence. Indeed, as we have seen, beauty is but the revelation of moral truth, in its proper form to the human

sense.

The whole system of recovering grace provided for man, darkly delineated in the features of his natural constitution, and of the physical world about him, and expressly, and in word, set forth in revelation, proceeds upon this principle, that man is to be emancipated and elevated through the attractions of pure virtue revealed to the sense. What is the power of the cross on the soul of man, but the power of Divine love and compassion set forth in resistless beauty and loveliness? What is the power of Christ's incarnation, of his life in the flesh, but the power of perfect beauty and loveliness? We speak of the instrumentality only, employed by the Divine Sanctifier. What was the revelation of the Son of God in the Apostle Paul, but the revelation of Divine excellence and love in its perfect attractiveness? What does the Apostle mean, when he speaks of the assimilating power of a contemplated Christ, changing into the same image from glory to glory, in the manner and way of the sanctifying Spirit? What is Christ formed within us, but the lovely image of his perfect character, enstamped by him whose office it is to show Christ to men? That the gospel has a voice for the ear of conscience, is true. But so far as the gospel is distinguished from the law in its peculiar province and power, it works through the heart; though the aesthetic sense-the capacity within us of discerning and feeling the beauty of perfect moral excellence, of experiencing its ravishing power, and through the sympathies. "We love him, because he first loved us." While love has a contagious, self-propagating power, through our sympathetic nature, it has also an aesthetic power, awakening our admiration, ravishing the sense, and captivating the affections to itself. If the law impels, working from within-from the conscience, the gospel draws, working from without upon

the

love of what is good and perfect. If the law commands and drives, the gospel woos. And this motive-influence from without, that thus draws and woos is, aside from the power of sympathy involved with it, essentially an æsthetic influence working upon our admiration of what is great and good, our love of what is excellent, and our consequent desire to make such admired and loved excellence our own. God, as worthy to be obeyed, is revealed to the conscience; God, as worthy to be loved, is revealed to the heart in its æsthetic susceptibilities. All natural beauty is the express image of the Creator's moral perfections. It is the revelation of his perfect freedom, working unrestrained, and with a high rational aim in its department of grace; and the revelation of his perfect character, all whose thoughts and sentiments and moral states are pure and lovely, in whatever it has of fixed and inherent beauty. While the accordance of all in nature which excites our admiration, and our æsthetic love, with the principles of propriety, evinces to us the harmony of his character and acts with the absolute standard of right. Even the beauty of human art has the same tendency and effect remotely. For man himself, as a freeworking artist, is so far only the image of his Maker; and his works, so far as possessing artistic excellence, are but the similitudes of the Divine creations.

All æsthetic beauty thus discovers a God-a being perfect in character, and worthy of universal homage and love. All its discoveries are in perfect accordance with the revelations of God in the strictly moral world, whether made through the conscience, or through the allotments of the external world, exhibiting moral sanctions and inculcating moral duties. It leads up in its own proper tendency, to the perfect living Creator and governor of all. It displays him to the soul with a power peculiar to itself;-not in the inanimate form of abstract influence and deduction; not in the repelling, overwhelming terrors of mere rigorous sovereignty and dominion; but in the bright, attractive, wooing character of a God of perfect loveliness. It furnishes evidence to the heart, deeper, stronger than any which the speculative reason, marking the correspondence of all the revelations of wisdom and power in nature with its own ideal of a perfect being, or the conscience testifying to the demands made upon it from without, can furnish. It is evidence which, tried by the most critical philosophy, must be pronounced valid and authoritative. The soul of man, thus trained under a true æsthetic culture, is ushered into a world of moral light and power, in which it feels the mightiest impulses, encouragements, and aids to holiness; finds at once its model and end, and its needed means and instruments.

With all this, we are to bear in mind that the moral influence of æsthetic culture reaches men in their own sphere of sense. Imprisoned, as he is, in the flesh, it visits him in his prison, and with a gentle hand unrivets his fetters. It takes the wise in their