se some colors are too dear for
him,--such a passer-by, chancing to hear our voice, and see the
atmosphere of our content, may learn a wondrous secret,--that
pennilessness is not poverty, and ownership is not possession; that to be
without is not always to lack, and to reach is not to attain; that
sunlight is for all eyes that look up, and color for those who "choose."

The Apostle of Beauty.

He is not of the twelve, any more than the golden rule is of the ten. "A
greater commandment I give unto you," was said of that. Also it was called
the "new commandment." Yet it was really older than the rest, and greater
only because it included them all. There were those who kept it ages
before Moses went up Sinai: Joseph, for instance, his ancestor; and the
king's daughter, by whose goodness he lived. So stands the Apostle of
Beauty, greater than the twelve, newer and older; setting Gospel over
against law, having known law before its beginning; living triumphantly
free and unconscious of penalty.

He has had martyrdom, and will have. His church is never established; the
world does not follow him; only of Wisdom is he known, and of her
children, who are children of light. He never speaks by their mouths who
say "Shalt not." He knows that "shalt not" is illegitimate, puny, trying
always to usurp the throne of the true king, "Thou shalt."

"This is delight," "this is good to see," he says of a purity, of a fair
thing. It needs not to speak of the impurity, of the ugliness. Left
unmentioned, unforbidden, who knows how soon they might die out of men's
lives, perhaps even from the earth's surface? Men hedging gardens have for
centuries set plants under that "letter of law" which "killeth," until the
very word hedge has become a pain and an offence; and all the while there
have been standing in every wild country graceful walls of unhindered
brier and berry, to which the apostles of beauty have been silently
pointing. By degrees gardeners have learned something. The best of them
now call themselves "landscape gardeners;" and that is a concession, if it
means, as I suppose it does, that they will try to copy Nature's
landscapes in their enclosures. I have seen also of late that on rich
men's estates tangled growths of native bushes are being more let alone,
and hedges seem to have had some of the weights and harness taken off of
them.

This is but one little matter among millions with which the Apostle of
Beauty has to