es of art
with more even of a momentary interest than the morning wreaths of smoke
ascending so beautifully from a cottage chimney, or cares much to
preserve them. The traceries of hoar frost upon the windows of inhabited
rooms are not only beautiful in the highest degree, but have been shown
in several French memoirs to obey laws of transcendental geometry, and
also to obey physical laws of startling intricacy. These lovely forms of
almighty nature wear the grandeur of mystery, of floral beauty, and of
science (immanent science) not always fathomable.[6] They are anything
but capricious. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like _them_;
and yet, simply because the sad hand of mortality is upon them, because
they are dedicated to death, because on genial days they will have
passed into the oblivion of graves before the morning sun has mounted to
his meridian, we do not so much as honour them with a transient stare
from the breakfast-table. Ah, wretches that we are, the horrid
carnalities of tea and toast, or else the horrid bestialities in morning
journals of Chartists and Cobdenites at home, of Red Ruffians abroad,
draw off our attention from the chonchoids and the cycloids pencilled by
the Eternal Geometrician! and these celestial traceries of the dawn,
which neither Da Vinci nor Raphaello was able to have followed as a
mimic, far less as a rival, we regard as a nuisance claiming the
attentions of the window-cleaner; even as the spider's web, that might
absorb an angel into reverie, is honoured amongst the things banned by
the housemaid. But _the_ reason why the wax-work disgusts is that it
seeks to reproduce in literal detail the traits that should be softened
under a general diffusive impression; the likeness to nature is
presented in what is essentially fleeting and subsidiary, and the 'check
of difference' is found also in this very literality, and not in any
effort of the etherealizing imagination, as it is in all true works of
art; so that the case really stands the exact opposite of that which
Coleridge had given in his definition.[7]

To pass from art to style. How loose and arbitrary Coleridge not
infrequently was in face of the laws on that subject which he had
himself repeatedly laid down! Could it be believed of a man so quick to
feel, so rapid to arrest all phenomena, that in a matter so important as
that of style, he should have nothing loftier to record of his own
merits, services, reformations, or