ORIGIN OF THE FINK AUTS. 185 



it are rendered pleasing. — "In love," says Homer, "oftentimes ilie things 

 tliat are not beautiful, seem beautiful." "Ilovv beautiful on the moun- 

 tain tops," says the prophet, "are the feet of them that bring glad ti- 

 dings of good things." He speaks of the Herald who brings the glad 

 news of deliverance. The sandelled feet soiled with the dust of travel, 

 and repulsive, became beautiful when the mind of the prophet connect- 

 ed them with Him whose journey they sped, bringing rapture to the 

 wasted children of Israel. 



The moment any object, whatever may have been its charms, has 

 an association of a repulsive character connected with it, it loses all its 

 beauty. If the lovely Paris sat upon the Judge's bench, the man whom 

 lie condemned to be hung, would think him a monster of ugliness. So 

 far will the mind carry its action under this law, that it will regard as 

 repulsive what has innocently or involuntarily become associated with 

 what we dislike. So the immortal poet, in the play of King John, when 

 the -Earl of Salisbury bids the lady Constance repair to the marriage of 

 the Dauphin Lewis to Blanch of Castile, a union which blasts all her 

 own prospects with those of her son, true to nature, makes her passion- 

 ately cry out to the involuntary messenger of evil : 



"Fellow begone ! I cannot brook thy sight ; 



This news hath made thee a most ugly man." * f 



THE ORIGIN OF THE FINE ARTS. 

 From the German of Kugler's Ilandbuch der Kuiistgeschichte. 



The origin of Art is to be sought in man's necessity of connecting 

 his thoughts with some lixed place, and giving this memorial place, this 

 monument, a form that shall be an expression of the thought. From 

 this commencement is developed, by a gradual process, the whole rich- 

 ness and the whole significancy of art, even up to its latest, most inde- 

 pendent and most sportive creations. For the idea of art necessarily 

 involves the presentation of the life of the spirit in a corporeal form ; 

 and it is everywhere its highest aim to present in the phenomena of the 

 material w'orld tlie spiritual import, in the transitory the permanent, 

 and in the temporal the eternal. It is, therefore, an error, when the or- 

 igin of art is deduced from the rude, sensual necessity which leads the 

 brute as well as the man to a formative effoit, or from the mere princi- 

 ple of invitation. However wonderful the works may be, which pro- 

 ceed from these two impulses, and especially from the first, they have 

 in themselves nothing in common with art, in the higher and proju^r 



* King John.. Act .3, Sc. 1. 



24 / 



