er earnest and laborious, and, I think, unhappy in their endless
labor, creatures, like the bee, that heap up riches and cannot tell who
shall gather them, and others employed like angels in endless offices of
love and praise. Of which when, in right condition of mind, we esteem
those most beautiful, whose functions are the most noble, whether as
some, in mere energy, or as others, in moral honor, so that we look with
hate on the foulness of the sloth, and the subtlety of the adder, and
the rage of the hyena: with the honor due to their earthly wisdom we
invest the earnest ant and unwearied bee; but we look with full
perception of sacred function to the tribes of burning plumage and
choral voice.[34] And so what lesson we might receive for our earthly
conduct from the creeping and laborious things, was taught us by that
earthly king who made silver to be in Jerusalem as stones (yet
thereafter was less rich towards God). But from the lips of an heavenly
King, who had not where to lay his head, we were taught what lesson we
have to learn from those higher creatures who sow not, nor reap, nor
gather into barns, for their Heavenly Father feedeth them.

Sec. 9. How impeded.

Sec. 10. The influence of moral signs in expression.

There is much difficulty in the way of our looking with this rightly
balanced judgment on the moral functions of the animal tribes, owing to
the independent and often opposing characters of typical beauty, which
are among them, as it seems, arbitrarily distributed, so that the most
fierce and cruel are often clothed in the liveliest colors, and
strengthened by the noblest forms, with this only exception, that so far
as I know, there is no high beauty in any slothful animal, but even
among those of prey, its characters exist in exalted measure upon those
that range and pursue, and are in equal degree withdrawn from those that
lie subtly and silently in the covert of the reed and fens. But that
mind only is fully disciplined in its theoretic power, which can, when
it chooses, throwing off the sympathies and repugnancies with which the
ideas of destructiveness or of innocence accustom us to regard the
animal tribes, as well as those meaner likes and dislikes which arise, I
think, from the greater or less resemblance of animal powers to our own,
can pursue the pleasures of typical beauty down to the scales of the
alligator, the coils of the serpent, and the joints of the beetle; and
again, on the othe