BEFORE BEAUTY 153 
—and one may add of beauty, too. It charms as 
color, or flowers, or jewels, or perfume, charms — 
and that is the end of it. 
It is ever present to the true artist, in his attempt 
to report nature, that every object as it stands in 
the circuit of cause and effect has a history which 
involves its surroundings, and that the depth of the 
interest which it awakens in us is in proportion as 
its integrity in this respect is preserved. In nature 
we are prepared for any opulence of color, or vegeta- 
tion, or freak of form, or display of any kind, because 
of the preponderance of the common, ever-present 
feature of the earth. The foil is always at hand. 
In like manner in the master poems we are never 
surfeited with mere beauty. 
Woe to any artist who disengages Beauty from the 
wide background of rudeness, darkness, and strength, 
—and disengages her from absolute nature! The 
mild and beneficent aspects of nature,— what gulfs 
and abysses of power underlie them! The great 
shaggy, barbaric earth, yet the summing-up, the 
plenum, of all we know or can know of beauty! So 
the orbic poems of the world have a foundation as 
of the earth itself, and are beautiful because they 
are something else first. Homer chose for his 
groundwork War, clinching, tearing, tugging war; 
in Dante, it is Hell; in Milton, Satan and the Fall; 
in Shakespeare, it is the fierce Feudal world, with 
its towering and kingly personalities; in Byron, it 
is Revolt and diabolic passion. When we get to 
Tennyson the lion is a good deal tamed, but he is 
