and emotion (or poetry and
passion); and, lastly, the gratification of the senses, first of the
eye, then of the ear, and then of the others in their order.

Sec. XXX. All these we are apt to make subservient to the desire of
praise; nor unwisely, when the praise sought is God's and the
conscience's: but if the sacrifice is made for man's admiration, and
knowledge is only sought for praise, passion repressed or affected for
praise, and the arts practised for praise, we are feeding on the bitterest
apples of Sodom, suffering always ten mortifications for one delight. And
it seems to me, that in the modern civilized world we make such sacrifice
doubly: first, by laboring for merely ambitious purposes; and secondly,
which is the main point in question, by being ashamed of simple pleasures,
more especially of the pleasure in sweet color and form, a pleasure
evidently so necessary to man's perfectness and virtue, that the beauty of
color and form has been given lavishly throughout the whole of creation,
so that it may become the food of all, and with such intricacy and
subtlety that it may deeply employ the thoughts of all. If we refuse to
accept the natural delight which the Deity has thus provided for us, we
must either become ascetics, or we must seek for some base and guilty
pleasures to replace those of Paradise, which we have denied ourselves.

Some years ago, in passing through some of the cells of the Grand
Chartreuse, noticing that the window of each apartment looked across the
little garden of its inhabitant to the wall of the cell opposite, and
commanded no other view, I asked the monk beside me, why the window was
not rather made on the side of the cell whence it would open to the
solemn fields of the Alpine valley. "We do not come here," he replied,
"to look at the mountains."

Sec. XXXI. The same answer is given, practically, by the men of this
century, to every such question; only the walls with which they enclose
themselves are those of pride, not of prayer. But in the middle ages it
was otherwise. Not, indeed, in landscape itself, but in the art which
can take the place of it, in the noble color and form with which they
illumined, and into which they wrought, every object around them that
was in any wise subjected to their power, they obeyed the laws of their
inner nature, and found its proper food. The splendor and fantasy even
of dress, which in these days we pretend to despise, or in which, if we
even i