en
one should begin to decide and to distinguish, and to form one's own
taste. And then I believe it is better to be individual than catholic,
and better to attempt to feed one's own genuine sense of preference,
than to continue attempting to correct it by the standard of other
people.

It remains that the whole instinct for admiring beauty is one of the
most mysterious experiences of the mind. There are certain things, like
the curves and colours of flowers, the movements of young animals, that
seem to have a perennial attraction for the human spirit. But the
enjoyment of natural scenery, at all events of wild and rugged
prospects, seems hardly to have existed among ancient writers, and to
have originated as late as the eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson spoke of
mountains with disgust, and Gray seems to have been probably the first
man who deliberately cultivated a delight in the sight of those
"monstrous creatures of God," as he calls mountains. Till his time, the
emotions that "nodding rocks" and "cascades" gave our forefathers seem
mostly to have been emotions of terror; but Gray seems to have had a
perception of the true quality of landscape beauty, as indeed that
wonderful, chilly, unsatisfied, critical nature seems to have had of
almost everything. His letters are full of beautiful vignettes, and it
pleases me to think that he visited Rydal and thought it beautiful,
about the time that Wordsworth first drew breath.

But the perception of beauty in art, in architecture, in music, is a
far more complicated thing, for there seem to be no fixed canons here;
what one needs in art, for instance, is not that things should be
perfectly seen and accurately presented; a picture of hard fidelity is
often entirely displeasing; but one craves for a certain sense of
personality, of emotion, of inner truth; something that seizes
tyrannously upon the soul, and makes one desire more of the intangible
and indescribable essence.

I always feel that the instinct for beauty is perhaps the surest
indication of some essence of immortality in the soul; and indeed there
are moments when it gives one the sense of pre-existence, the feeling
that one has loved these fair things in a region that is further back
even than the beginnings of consciousness. Blake, indeed, in one of his
wild half-inspired utterances, went even further, and announced that a
man's hopes of immortality depended not upon virtuous conduct but upon
intellectual perce