things is wrong and ugly; for the right restraint, the image of Divine
operation, is both in them, and in men, a willing and not painful
stopping short of the utmost degree to which their power might reach,
and the appearance of fettering or confinement is the cause of ugliness
in the one, as the slightest painfulness or effort in restraint is a
sign of sin in the other.

Sec. 6. It is the girdle of beauty.

Sec. 7. How found in natural curves and colors.

Sec. 8. How difficult of attainment, yet essential to all good.

I have put this attribute of beauty last, because I consider it the
girdle and safeguard of all the rest, and in this respect the most
essential of all, for it is possible that a certain degree of beauty may
be attained even in the absence of one of its other constituents, as
sometimes in some measure without symmetry or without unity. But the
least appearance of violence or extravagance, of the want of moderation
and restraint, is, I think, destructive of all beauty whatsoever in
everything, color, form, motion, language, or thought, giving rise to
that which in color we call glaring, in form inelegant, in motion
ungraceful, in language coarse, in thought undisciplined, in all
unchastened; which qualities are in everything most painful, because the
signs of disobedient and irregular operation. And herein we at last find
the reason of that which has been so often noted respecting the subtilty
and almost invisibility of natural curves and colors, and why it is that
we look on those lines as least beautiful which fall into wide and far
license of curvature, and as most beautiful which approach nearest (so
that the curvilinear character be distinctly asserted) to the government
of the right line, as in the pure and severe curves of the draperies of
the religious painters; and thus in color it is not red, but rose-color
which is most beautiful, neither such actual green as we find in summer
foliage partly, and in our painting of it constantly; but such gray
green as that into which nature modifies her distant tints, or such pale
green and uncertain as we see in sunset sky, and in the clefts of the
glacier and the chrysoprase, and the sea-foam; and so of all colors, not
that they may not sometimes be deep and full, but that there is a solemn
moderation even in their very fulness, and a holy reference beyond and
out of their own nature to great harmonies by which they are governed,
and in obedience to wh