PROLEGOMENON. 43 



grandeur of the Eternal, to be admitted to a hearing with- 

 out special plea, and to fill the formula of the ends of 

 Divine Love and Divine Wisdom in the universal economy. 



Which also being taken for granted and held in the 

 clear light of a revelation, it is fully apparent that it is 

 chiefly in its aspects of benignity, and its promises of good 

 to humanity, that the Mountain asserts its claim to the con- 

 sideration of men. Those rushing streams of purest water, 

 those ever-green solitudes of piny forests fresh with the 

 verdure of immortal youth, those mountain -heights bathed 

 by the waves of an ocean of air unmingled with an earthly 

 taint and pure as ether, are surely not meant to fade and 

 pass away as the fantastically-arranged phenomenal, to vanish 

 as useless visions and cloud-pictures in the sky, or shimmer 

 as ornamental appendages for dramatic purposes, floating 

 on the artist's easel only, in a world of soberest uses and 

 savagest realities, with the single apology that " beauty is 

 its own excuse for being. NOTHING WE SEE BUT MEANS OUR 

 GOOD." Mingled ever with the radiant form of the beauti- 

 ful is the earnest and sober dowdyism of the useful and 

 necessary. Use, use in all things would seem in certain 

 attitudes of Nature to be her only object; for "all the goods 

 which exist are called uses, and by these uses are meant all 

 things which appear upon the earth, as animals of every 

 kind, vegetables of every kind, nourishment, clothing, 

 habitation, recreation, delight, protection, and preservation." 

 Under the despotism of this light, insignificant seem all 

 other aspects of things : this is the fierce realization which 

 all men and animals make of the world, and to whose 

 tyrannizing instincts the earth has no other end. To the 

 consciousness of most men, the homely mantle of utilita- 

 rianism covers all things, and of other or higher purposes 

 in existence there are simply none. 



But the globe is round, the atom is round, and Nature 

 revels in spheres; and to take, as representative integers, 

 arcs of her circles or segments of her orbs, is to lose the 

 unity of her purpose, the totality of her end, to avert the 



