oet's sonnet, equally inspired by the hour and place. Color and line
and form, although they happen to be the properties of _things,_
have a value for the emotions as truly as musical sounds: they are
the outward symbol of the inward thought or feeling, the visible
bodying forth of the immaterial idea.

The symbolic character of the material world is not early
apprehended. In superficial reaction upon life, men do not readily
pass beyond the immediate actuality. That the spiritual meaning of
all things is not perceived, that all things are not seen to be beautiful,
or expressive of the supreme harmony, is due to men's limited
powers of sight and feeling. Therefore is it that the artist is given in
order that he may reveal as yet unrealized spiritual relations, or new
beauty. The workaday world with its burden of exigent "realities"
has need of a Carlyle to declare that things are but a wonderful
metaphor and the physical universe is the garment of the living God.
In the realm of thought an Emerson, seer of transcendent vision,
must come to restore his fellows to their birthright, which is the life
of the spirit. As in life, so in art men do not easily pass the obvious
and immediate. The child reads "Gulliver's Travels" or "The
Pilgrim's Progress" for the story. As his experience of life both
widens and deepens, he is able to see through externals, and he
penetrates to the real significance, of which the narrative is but the
symbol. So it is with an insight born of experience that the lover of
art sees no longer the "subject," but the beauty which the subject is
meant to symbolize.

In the universal, all-embracing constitution of things, nothing is
without its significance. To be aware that everything has a meaning
is necessary to the understanding of art, as indeed of life itself. That
meaning, which things symbolize and express, it cannot be said too
often, is not necessarily to be phrased in words. It is a meaning for
the spirit. A straight line affects one differently from a curve; that is,
each kind of line means something. Every line in the face utters the
character behind it; every movement of the body is eloquent of the
man's whole being. "The expression of the face balks account," says
Walt Whitman,

"But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his
face,
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints
of his hips and wrists,
It is in his wal