And a few pages earlier he is more brief and distinct, calling the beautiful “the sensuous shining forth of the idea.”  And Schelling, in his profound treatise on “The Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature,” says, “The beautiful is beyond form; it is substance, the universal; it is the look and expression of the spirit of Nature.”  Were it not better and more precise to say that it is to us the look and expression of the spiritual when this is peering through choicest embodiments?  But we will stop with definitions.  After endeavoring, by means of sentences and definitions to get a notion of the beautiful, one is tempted to say, as Goethe did when “the idea of the Divinity” was venturously mentioned to him by Eckermann, “Dear child, what know we of the idea of the Divinity? and what can our narrow ideas tell of the Highest Being?  Should I, like a Turk, name it with a hundred names, I should still fall short, and, in comparison with the infinite attributes, have said nothing.”

We have called the beautiful the light of the mind; but there must be mind to be illuminated.  If your torch be waved in a chamber set round with bits of granite and slate and pudding-stone, you will get no luminous reverberation.  But brandish it before rubies and emeralds and diamonds!  The qualities in the mind must be precious, in order that the mind become radiant through beauty.  To take a broad example.

The Hindoos in their organization have a fine sense of the beautiful, but they lack mental breadth and bottom; and hence their life and literature are not strong and manifold, although in both there are exhibitions of that refinement which only comes of sensibility to the beautiful.  The Chinese, on the other hand, are wanting in this sensibility; hence their prosaic, finite civilization.  But most noteworthy is the contrast between them in religious development.  In that of the Hindoos there was expansion, vastness, self-merging in infinitude; the Chinese are religiously contracted, petty, idolatrous; a contrast which I venture to ascribe, in large measure, to the presence in the one case, and the absence in the other, of the inspiration of the beautiful.

To the same effect individual examples might be cited innumerable.  Look at Wordsworth and Byron, both preeminent for sensibility to the beautiful; but, from deep diverseness in other leading mental gifts, the one, through the light of this vivifying power, became a poet of the propensities and the understanding, a poet of passion and wit; the other, a poet of the reason, a poet of nature and meditative emotion.

To do their best the moral feelings, too, need the light and inward stimulus of the beautiful; but if these feelings are by nature weak, no strength or intensity of the sense of beauty will have power to get from a mind thus deficient high moral thought or action.  If there be present the accomplishment of verse, we shall have a Byron; or, the other poetic gifts in full measure, with lack of this accomplishment,