mbine fortuitously
mere natural phenomena; he must be able to select those in which God has
incarnated His Idea. Where is he to find a guide through this labyrinth
of sounds, forms, tones, and colors?

He must strive to realize the ideas given him by the Creator; he must
surround us here with the memories of our lost Paradise; he must repeat
to us the mysterious words and tones which God confides to his heart in
his lonely walks to the holy temple, in his solitary musings in the dim
forests, or in his prayerful hours under the starlit heavens of the
solemn midnight.

'With whose beauty (of created things) if they being delighted took
them to be gods, let them know how much the Lord of them is more
beautiful than they: _for the first Author of Beauty made all those
things_.'--_Book of Wisdom._

'And they shall strengthen the state of the world; and _their
prayer shall be in the work of their craft_, applying their soul,
and searching in the law of the Most High.'--_Ecclesiasticus._

Here, then, is the secret--gratitude and love are to be the teachers of
the artist. Naught save love will enable him to read the wondrous runes
of God's creation; nothing but sympathy can catch the strange tones of
mythic music; there is nothing pure, which can be painted, save by the
pure in heart. The foul or blunt feeling will see itself in everything,
and set down blasphemies; it will see Beelzebub in the casting out of
devils; it will find its God of flies in every alabaster box of precious
ointment; in faith and zeal toward God it will not believe; charity it
will regard as lust; compassion as pride; every virtue it will
misinterpret, every faithfulness malign. But the mind of the devout
artist will find its own image wherever it exists; it will seek for what
it loves, and draw it out of dens and caves; it will believe in its
being, often where it cannot see it, and always turn away its eyes from
beholding vanity; it will lie lovingly over all the foul and rough
places of the human heart, as the snow from heaven does over the hard
and broken mountain rocks, following their forms truly, yet catching
light from heaven for them to make them fair--and that must be a steep
and unkindly crag, indeed, which it cannot cover.

The artist must direct his eyes to the spheres of Sovereign Beauty; he
must lend his ears to the harmonies of the Eternal World, that he may be
able to decipher the symbolic signs wh