requirement can have no power or authority over those on
whom we would impose it. All that morality can require is the
inward harmony of each life: and if we still abhor the thought of a
possible being who should be happy without love, or knowledge,
or beauty, the aversion we feel is not moral but instinctive, not
rational but human. What revolts us is not the want of excellence
in that other creature, but his want of affinity to ourselves. Could
we survey the whole universe, we might indeed assign to each
species a moral dignity proportionate to its general beneficence
and inward wealth; but such an absolute standard, if it exists, is
incommunicable to us; and we are reduced to judging of the
excellence of every nature by its relation to the human.

All these matters, however, belong to the sphere of ethics, nor
should we give them here even a passing notice, but for the
influence which moral ideas exert over aesthetic judgments. Our
sense of practical benefit not only determines the moral value of
beauty, but sometimes even its existence as an aesthetic good.
Especially in the right _selection_ of effects, these considerations
have weight. Forms in themselves pleasing may become disagreeable
when the practical interests then uppermost in the mind
cannot, without violence, yield a place to them. Thus too
much eloquence in a diplomatic document, or in a familiar letter,
or in a prayer, is an offence not only against practical sense, but
also against taste. The occasion has tuned us to a certain key of
sentiment, and deprived us of the power to respond to other stimuli.

If things of moment are before us, we cannot stop to play with
symbols and figures of speech. We cannot attend to them with
pleasure, and therefore they lose the beauty they might elsewhere
have had. They are offensive, not in themselves, -- for nothing is
intrinsically ugly, -- but by virtue of our present demand for
something different. A prison as gay as a bazaar, a church as dumb
as a prison, offend by their failure to support by their aesthetic
quality the moral emotion with, which we approach them. The arts
must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until
they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life. This is the
consequence of the superficial stratum on which they flourish;
their roots, as we have seen, are not deep in the world, and they
appear only as unstable, superadded activities, employments of our
freedom, after the