348 THE AESTHETICS OF 



beautiful, indeed neither beautiful nor ugly, but the curved, 

 broken line, inviting the eye to divergent motion, makes a 

 claim to aesthetic criticism and we call it beautiful when 

 the movement of the eye is gentle and continuous, ugly, 

 when the eye, frequently and suddenly diverted in its course, 

 cannot follow the angular lines with one connected move- 

 ment, but only by immediate change of direction. But 

 the feeling of Beauty may also be awakened by contrast, 

 by opposition, when as it were, the phenomena satisfies an 

 unperceived fundamental law (as in the well-known 

 assembling of the complementary colours) and the demand 

 for the completion of an ideal Whole ; and so in contrast 

 itself a contenting feeling of completion is excited. 

 These remarks will perhaps make us better understand the 

 oft-repeated statement that hot regions lose a main charm 

 of the landscape in the want of our meadows, for grass- 

 grown, tree-less plains are by no means wanting in the 

 New World, generally, and especially under the tropics of 

 both the Old and New Continents. But when we speak 

 of the beauty of our meadows, we do not in reality at all 

 mean the meadows themselves, that is the grassy level 

 surfaces, but the varying shapes, and thence agreeable con- 

 trasts between the velvet-like green carpet and the bushes 

 rising from them in fair rounded forms up to the majestic 

 hilly woods; and the gloomy Pine-heaths of the Mark 

 would not become any more beautiful were their endless 

 surfaces, which cannot be wholly surveyed from any hill 

 occurring there, to be overgrown with ever so rich a vege- 

 tation of Grass, in the absence of all timber. 



When we now place beside the Wood-formations, those 

 of the Plains, we introduce quite a new aesthetic element 

 into the contemplation of Nature. The woods we cannot 

 imagine divested of the element of Beauty, on account of 



