iden stands
to him for a representative of all select things and virtues. For that
reason the lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her
kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother,
or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no
resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows
and the song of birds.

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the
nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are
touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot
find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It
is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to
organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love
known and described in society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite
other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy
and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot
approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres,
hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent
things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at
appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he
said to music, "Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which in all
my endless life I have not found, and shall not find." The same fluency
may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then
beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out
of criticism and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand,
but demands an active imagination to go with it and to say what it is in
the act of doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented
in a transition from that which is representable to the senses, to that
which is not. Then first it ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds
of painting. And of poetry the success is not attained when it lulls and
satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after
the unattainable. Concerning it Landor inquires "whether it is not to be
referred to some purer state of sensation and existence."

In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming and itself when
it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end;
when it suggests gleams and visions and not earthly satisfactions; when
it makes the beholder feel his unworthines