re rivulets dance their wayward round,
_And beauty burn of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face!_"

The material Beauty of the world, as exhibited in the manifold objects,
sounds, perfumes, motions of Nature, is created for a nobler purpose
than only to delight the senses and please the aesthetic faculties.
I believe it is the distant source whence flow all our dear daily
affections. We know, that, according to the suggestions of our merely
human passions and instincts, we ease our hearts of Love by heaping
treasures and the choicest gifts of fancy in the laps of those whom we
most dearly cherish. We take no credit to ourselves for such precious
prodigalities; for they are the inevitable and disinterested outpourings
of affection. They are received as such. And when we cast our eyes
abroad and behold the loving prodigality of a divine hand, we accept the
manifestation, are made happy in the consciousness of being beloved,
and, constituted as we are in the image and likeness of God, express our
instinctive gratitude in those fine human sympathies which impress the
seal of Truth on the primary idea of our creation.

And so, blessed are the shadows of porches and cloisters! Blessed the
hours of serene meditation, when the "tender grace of days that are
dead," of flowers that have faded, of scenes "gone glimmering through
the dream of things that were," comes back to us with a new meaning,
softening and refining the heart to unexpected capacities of affection.
But how they fade away, these ghostly and unsubstantial pageants, when
they "scent the morning air"! How they leave in our hearts nought but
the dim consciousness that we are capable of an existence ineffably
deeper and vaster than that which we lead in the visible world! Nought
but this? Alas, poor human nature! do we leave the casket of Pandora
open in wanton carelessness, and let all escape but the mere scent of
the roses? Or does there not remain, behind an indefinable presence to
comfort and console us,--the precious _Ideal of Beauty_,--

"The light that never was on sea or land,
The inspiration and the poet's dream"?

The human heart forever yearns _to create_,--this is the pure antique
word for it,--to give expression and life to an evasive loveliness that
haunts the soul in those moments when the body is laid asleep and the
spirit walks. There is a continual and godlike longing to embody these
elusive phantoms of Beauty. But the immortal songs