s, which remains arid and unmeaning if we
stop with it and forget to translate it again at the end into its
concrete equivalent. The commercial mind dwells in that
intermediate limbo of symbolized values; the calculator's senses
are muffled by his intellect and by his habit of abbreviated thinking.
His mental process is a reckoning that loses sight of its original
values, and is over without reaching any concrete image. Therefore
the knowledge of cost, when expressed in terms of money, is
incapable of contributing to aesthetic effect, but the reason is not
so much that the suggested value is not aesthetic, as that no real
value is suggested at all. No object of any kind is presented to the
mind by the numerical expression. If we reinterpret our price,
however, and translate it back into the facts which constitute it,
into the materials employed, their original place and quality, and
the labour and art which transformed them into the present thing,
then we add to the aesthetic value of the object, by the expression
which we find in it, not of its price in money, but of its human cost.
We have now the consciousness of the real values which it
represents, and these values, sympathetically present to the fancy,
increase our present interest and admiration.

I believe economists count among the elements of the value of an
object the rarity of its material, the labour of its manufacture, and
the distance from which it is brought. Now all these qualities, if
attended to in themselves, appeal greatly to the imagination. We
have a natural interest in what is rare and affects us with unusual
sensations. What comes from a far country carries our thoughts
there, and gains by the wealth and picturesqueness of its
associations. And that on which human labour has been spent,
especially if it was a labour of love, and is apparent in the product,
has one of the deepest possible claims to admiration. So that the
standard of cost, the most vulgar of all standards, is such only
when it remains empty and abstract. Let the thoughts wander back
and consider the elements of value, and our appreciation, from
being verbal and commercial, becomes poetic and real.

We have in this one more example of the manner in which
practical values, when suggested by and incorporated in any object,
contribute to its beauty. Our sense of what lies behind, unlovely
though that background may be, gives interest and poignancy to
that which is present; our atte