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Beautiful in the humau form and face: there, he said, it 

 reigned in "full-voiced harmony,'* and we could form no 

 higher conception of beauty, than what we derived from a 

 study of the grace and expression of the lineaments divine of 

 man, — the type and image of the Creator. 



The chief benefit of travel, he said, was found in the in- 

 fluence of the Beautiful upon the mind : a man might know 

 and feel much without going from his native town or village, 

 but to traverse the entire scale of beauty, he must behold the 

 different climes and changing aspects of creation. The sight 

 of Venice or Naples would be an epoch in his life; every 

 fresh phenomonon would have a new voice for him; new 

 chords would be struck in his imagination; and he would 

 come home renewed, not merely in strength of body, but in 

 vigour of mind and freshness of heart, and with a greater love 

 for nature and his species. 



The Beautiful stood to us as an attendant nymph of our 

 being, our soul's preceptress and companion, whose instructions 

 commenced before those of the tutor, and continued after 

 them. Beauty, whether we sought it or not, had an influence 

 upon our lives. Some of our earliest recollections were tinged 

 with its beams ; and effects of no ordinary character are doubt- 

 less produced by it, even upon the wayward actions of child- 

 hood. 



Beauty, he observed, was not a creature of individual fancy, 

 but a quality dependant on fixed principles. The same Power 

 that ordained the gravitation of the globe had determined 

 the laws of taste, and linked the chain of sympathy between 

 the Beautiful and humanity. 



In tracing the metaphysical origin of art he contended that 

 all liuman beings possessed, in a greater or less degree, a sus- 

 ceptibility to the influence of the Beautiful in nature ; but 

 that the intellectual power to embody the feeling in the way 

 of art belonged only to the artist, who felt so strongly the 

 power of nature's charms as to be compelled to give utterance 



