ccordance
with Lord Bacon's suggestion that "Nature is rather busy not to err,
than in labor to produce excellency") in the tendency to hide those that
are ugly, as toads, owls, bats, worms, insects that flee the light, the
fishes of the bottom, the intestines of animals. But these are hints
only, and Nature, as Mr. Ruskin confesses, will sometimes introduce "not
ugliness only, but ugliness in the wrong place." Were beauty the aim, it
should be most evident in her chief products; whereas it is in things
transient, minute, subordinate,--flowers, snow-flakes, the microscopic
details of structure,--that it meets us most invariably, rather than in
the higher animals or in man. Nor in man does it keep pace with his
civilization, but obeys laws that belong to the lower regions of his
nature.

This ambiguity of every fact in Nature comes from the difficulty of
detecting its true connection. There is reality _there_, even in blight
and corruption; something is forwarded, only perhaps not the thing
before us,--as the virtue of the compost-heap appears not in it, but in
the rose-bed. The artist cannot forego a jot of reality, but the obvious
facts are not this, any more than the canvas and the pigment are the
picture. The prose of every-day life is reality in fragments,--the Alps
split into paving-stones,--Achilles with a cold in the head. Seen in due
connection, they make up the reality; but their prominence as they occur
is casual and shifting, and the result dependent on the spectator's
power of discerning, amid the endless series in which they are involved,
more or less of their vital relations.

Art is not to be blamed for idealizing, for this is only completing what
Nature begins. But the completion of the design is also its limitation.
It is final to the artist as well as to the theme, and cannot yield to
further expansion. In Nature there is no such pretence of finality, and
so her work, though never complete, is never convicted of defect. Her
circuits are never closed; she does not aim to cure the defect in the
thing, but in something else. Each in turn she abandons, and appeals to
a future success, which never is, but always about to be. The reason is,
that the scope of each is wider than immediately appears. It is not
simple completeness that is aimed at, but ascent to higher levels, so
that the consummation it demands, if granted, would cut it off from more
vital connections elsewhere. The ideal of the crystal seems