d when we
look upon a beautiful object, that has quite as much to do with the
impression made upon the mind as anything in the object itself; perhaps
more. There is somehow an immense and undefined background of vast and
unconscionable energy, as of earthquakes, and ocean storms, and cleft
mountains, across which things of beauty play, and to which they
constantly defer; and when this background is wanting, as it is in much
current poetry, beauty sickens and dies, or at most has only a feeble
existence.

Nature does nothing merely for beauty; beauty follows as the inevitable
result; and the final impression of health and finish which her works
make upon the mind is owing as much to those things which are not
technically called beautiful as to those which are. The former give
identity to the latter. The one is to the other what substance is to
form, or bone to flesh. The beauty of nature includes all that is called
beautiful, as its flower; and all that is not called beautiful, as its
stalk and roots.

Indeed, when I go to the woods or the fields, or ascend to the hilltop,
I do not seem to be gazing upon beauty at all, but to be breathing it
like the air. I am not dazzled or astonished; I am in no hurry to look
lest it be gone. I would not have the litter and debris removed, or the
banks trimmed, or the ground painted. What I enjoy is commensurate
with the earth and sky itself. It clings to the rocks and trees; it is
kindred to the roughness and savagery; it rises from every tangle and
chasm; it perches on the dry oak-stubs with the hawks and buzzards; the
crows shed it from their wings and weave it into their nests of coarse
sticks; the fox barks it, the cattle low it, and every mountain path
leads to its haunts. I am not a spectator of, but a participator in it.
It is not an adornment; its roots strike to the centre of the earth.

All true beauty in nature or in art is like the iridescent hue of
mother-of-pearl, which is intrinsic and necessary, being the result of
the arrangement of the particles,--the flowering of the mechanism of the
shell; or like the beauty of health which comes out of and reaches back
again to the bones and the digestion. There is no grace like the grace
of strength. What sheer muscular gripe and power lie back of the firm,
delicate notes of the great violinist! "Wit," says Heine,--and the same
thing is true of beauty,--"isolated, is worthless. It is only endurable
when it rests on a solid bas