and is in its nature, its desires, its modes of nourishment, habitation and death, illustrative or expressive of certain moral dispositions or principles. Now, first, in the keenness of the sympathy which we feel in the happiness, real or apparent, of all organic beings, and which, as we shall presently see, invariably prompts us, from the joy we have in it, to look upon those as most lovely which are most happy; and secondly, in the justness of the moral sense which rightly reads the lesson they are all intended to teach, and classes them in orders of worthiness and beauty according to the rank and nature of that lesson, whether it be of warning or example, in those that wallow or in those that soar; in our right accepting and reading of all this, consists, I say, the ultimately perfect condition of that noble theoretic faculty, whose place in the system of our nature I have already partly vindicated with respect to typical, but which can only fully be established with respect to vital beauty.

Its first perfection, therefore, relating to Vital Beauty, is the kind- § 2. The perfection of the ness and unselfish fulness of heart, which receives the utmost amount Theoretic faculof pleasure from the happiness of all things. Of which in high ty as concerned with vital Beaudegree the heart of man is incapable; neither what intense enjoyment ty, is Charity. the angels may have in all that they see of things that move and live, and in the part they take in the shedding of God's kindness upon them, can we know or conceive: only in proportion as we draw near to God, and are made in measure like unto him, can we increase this our possession of Charity, of which the entire essence is in God only. But even the ordinary exercise of this faculty implies a condition of the whole moral being in some measure right and healthy, and to the entire exercise of it there is necessary the entire perfection of the Christian character; for he who loves not God, nor his brother, cannot love the grass beneath his feet and the creatures which live not for his uses, filling those spaces in the universe which he needs not; while on the other hand, none can love God, nor his human brother, without loving all things which his Father loves; nor without looking upon them, every one, as in that respect his brethren also, and perhaps worthier than he, if, in the under concords they have to fill, their part is touched more truly. It is good to read of that kindness and humbleness of St. Francis of Assisi, who spoke never to bird nor to cicala, nor even to wolf and beast of prey, but as his brother; and so we find

to

are moved the minds of all good and mighty men, as in the lesson that we have from the Mariner of Coleridge, and yet more truly and rightly taught in the Hartleap Well,

"Never to blend our pleasure, or our pride,

With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels;"

And again in the White Doe of Rylstone, with the added teaching, that anguish of our own-

"Is tempered and allayed by sympathies,

Aloft ascending and descending deep,

Even to the inferior kinds :"

So that I know not of anything more destructive of the whole theoretic faculty, not to say of the Christian character and human intellect, than those accursed sports in which man makes of himself, cat, tiger, serpent, chaetodon, and alligator in one; and gathers into one continuance of cruelty for his amusement all the devices that brutes sparingly and at intervals use against each other for their necessities.

§ 3. Only with As we pass from those beings of whose happiness and pain we are respect certain, to those in which it is doubtful, or only seeming, as possibly plants, less affection than in plants (though I would fain hold, if I might, "the faith that every

sympathy.

flower enjoys the air it breathes,") yet our feeling for them has in it
more of sympathy than of actual love, as receiving from them in
delight far more than we can give; for love, I think, chiefly grows in
giving; at least its essence is the desire of doing good, or giving
happiness. Still the sympathy of very sensitive minds usually reaches
so far as to the conception of life in the plant, and so to love, as with
Shakspeare always, as he has taught us in the sweet voices of Ophelia and
Perdita, and Wordsworth always, as of the daffodils, and the celandine.
"It doth not love the shower, nor seek the cold.
This neither is its courage, nor its choice,

But its necessity in being old,"

and so all other great poets'; nor do I believe that any mind, however rude, is without some slight perception or acknowledgment of joyfulness in breathless things, as most certainly there are none but feel instinctive delight in the appearances of such enjoyment.

1 Compare Milton.

"They at her coming sprung

And touched by her fair tendance, gladlier grew."

proportioned to

For it is matter of easy demonstration, that setting the characters § 4. Which is of typical beauty aside, the pleasure afforded by every organic form is in the appearance of Energy in proportion to its appearance of healthy vital energy: In a rose-tree, setting the Plants. aside all the considerations of gradated flushing of colour and fair folding of line, which its flowers share with the cloud or the snow-wreath, we find, in and through all this, certain signs pleasant and acceptable as signs of life and strength in the plant. Every leaf and stalk is seen to have a function, to be constantly exercising that function, and as it seems, solely for the good and enjoyment of the plant. It is true that reflection will show us that the plant is not living for itself alone, that its life is one of benefaction, that it gives as well as receives; but no sense of this whatsoever mingles with our perception of physical beauty in its forms. Those forms appear to be necessary to its health; the symmetry of its leaflets, the smoothness of its stalks, the vivid green of its shoots, are looked upon by us as signs of the plant's own happiness and perfection; they are useless to us, except as they give us pleasure in our sympathizing with that of the plant; and if we see a leaf withered, or shrunk, or worm eaten, we say it is ugly, and feel it to be painful, not because it hurts us, but because it seems to hurt the plant, and conveys to us an idea of pain and disease and failure of life in it.

That the amount of pleasure we receive is in exact proportion to the appearance of vigour and sensibility in the plant, is easily proved by observing the effect of those which show the evidences of it in the least degree, as, for instance, any of the cacti not in flower. Their masses are heavy and simple, their growth slow, their various parts, if they are ramified, jointed on one to another, as if they were buckled or pinned together instead of growing out of each other; and the fruit imposed upon the body of the plant, so that it looks like a swelling or disease. All these circumstances so concur to deprive the plant of vital evidences, that we receive from it more sense of pain than of beauty; and yet even here, the sharpness of the angles, the symmetrical order and strength of the spines, the fresh and even colour of the body, are looked for earnestly as signs of healthy condition; our pain is increased by their absence, and indefinitely increased if blotches, and other appearances of decay interfere with that little life which the plant seems to possess.

lity.

The same singular characters belong in animals to the crustacea, as to the lobster, crab, scorpion, &c. and in great measure deprive them of the beauty which we find in higher orders; so that we are reduced to look for their beauty to single parts and joints, and not to the whole animal.

§ 5. This sym- Now I wish particularly to impress upon the reader that all these pathy is unselfish and does sensations of beauty in the plant arise from our unselfish sympathy with not regard uti- its happiness, and not from any view of the qualities in it which may bring good to us, nor even from our acknowledgment in it of any moral condition beyond that of mere felicity; for such an acknowledgment belongs to the second operation of the theoretic faculty (compare § 2), and not to the sympathetic part which we are at present examining; so that we even find that in this respect, the moment we begin to look upon any creature as subordinate to some purpose out of itself, some of the sense of organic beauty is lost. Thus, when we are told that the leaves of a plant are occupied in decomposing carbonic acid, and preparing oxygen for us, we begin to look upon it with some such indifference as upon a gasometer. It has become a machine; some of our sense of its happiness is gone; its emanation of inherent life is no longer pure. The bending trunk, waving to and fro in the wind above the waterfall, is beautiful because it is happy, though it is perfectly useless to us. The same trunk, hewn down and thrown across the stream, has lost its beauty. It serves as a bridge, it has become useful; and its beauty is gone, or what it retains is purely typical, dependent on its lines and colours, not on its functions. Saw it into planks, and though now adapted to become permanently useful, its beauty is lost for ever, or to be regained only when decay and ruin shall have withdrawn it again from use, and left it to receive from the hand of nature the velvet moss and varied lichen, which may again suggest ideas of inherent happiness, and tint its mouldering sides with hues of life.

There is something, I think, peculiarly beautiful and instructive in this unselfishness of the Theoretic faculty, and in its abhorrence of all utility to one creature which is based on the pain or destruction of for in such services as are consistent with the essence and any other;

1 Exiit ad cœlum ramis felicibus arbos.

energy of both, it takes delight, as in the clothing of the rock by the herbage, and the feeding of the herbage by the stream.

:

with respect to

is destroyed by of

But still clearer evidence of its being indeed the expression § 6. Especially of happiness to which we look for our first pleasure in organic form, animals. is to be found in the way in which we regard the bodily frame of animals of which it is to be noted first, that there is not anything which causes so intense and tormenting a sense of ugliness as any scar, wound, monstrosity, or imperfection which seems inconsistent with the animal's ease and health; and that although in vegetables, where there is no immediate sense of pain, we are comparatively little hurt by excrescences and irregularities, but are sometimes even delighted with them, and fond of them, as children of the oak-apple, and sometimes look upon them as more interesting than the uninjured conditions, as in the gnarled and knotted trunks of trees; yet the slightest approach to any thing of the kind in animal form is regarded with intense horror, merely from the sense of pain it conveys. And, § 7. And it in the second place, it is to be noted that whenever we dissect the evidences animal frame, or conceive it as dissected, and substitute in our thoughts mechanism. the neatness of mechanical contrivance for the pleasure of the animal; the moment we reduce enjoyment to ingenuity, and volition to leverage, that instant all sense of beauty ceases. Take, for instance, the action of the limb of the ostrich, which is beautiful so long as we see it in its swift uplifting along the Desert sands, and trace in the tread of it her scorn of the horse and his rider, but would infinitely lose of its impressiveness, if we could see the spring ligament playing backwards and forwards in alternate jerks over the tubercle at the hock joint. Take again the action of the dorsal fin of the shark tribe. So long as we observe the consistent energy of motion in the whole frame, the lash of the tail, bound of body, and instantaneous lowering of the dorsal, to avoid the resistance of the water as it turns, there is high sense of organic power and beauty. But when we dissect the dorsal, and find that its superior ray is supported in its position by a peg in a notch at its base, and that, when the fin is to be lowered, the peg has to be taken out, and, when it is raised, put in again; although we are filled with wonder at the ingenuity of the mechanical contrivance, all our sense of beauty is gone, and not to be recovered until we again see the fin playing on