ractical. We are born
to like or dislike certain aspects of things; nor could I, by any
arguments, alter the defined tastes which you received at your birth,
and which the surrounding circumstances of life have enforced, without
any possibility of your voluntary resistance to them. And the result of
those surrounding circumstances, to-day, is that most English youths
would have more pleasure in looking at a locomotive than at a swallow;
and that many English philosophers would suppose the pleasure so
received to be through a new sense of beauty. But the meaning of the
word "beauty" in the fine arts, and in classical literature, is
properly restricted to those very qualities in which the locomotion of
a swallow differs from that of an engine.

[8] Delivered at Oxford, May 2d, 1873.

42. Not only from that of an engine; but also from that of animals in
whose members the mechanism is so complex as to give them a resemblance
to engines. The dart of the common house-fly, for instance, in full
strength, is a more wonderful movement than that of a swallow. The
mechanism of it is not only more minute, but the swiftness of the
action so much greater, that the vibration of the wing is invisible.
But though a school-boy might prefer the locomotive to the swallow, he
would not carry his admiration of finely mechanical velocity into
unqualified sympathy with the workmanship of the God of Ekron; and
would generally suppose that flies were made only to be food for the
more graceful fly-catcher,--whose finer grace you will discover, upon
reflection, to be owing to the very moderation and simplicity of its
structure, and to the subduing of that infinitude of joints, claws,
tissues, veins, and fibers which inconceivably vibrate in the
microscopic[9] creature's motion, to a quite intelligible and simple
balance of rounded body upon edged plume, maintained not without
visible, and sometimes fatigued, exertion, and raising the lower
creature into fellowship with the volition and the virtue of humanity.

[9] I call it so because the members and action of it cannot be
seen with the unaided eye.

43. With the virtue, I say, in an exceedingly qualified sense; meaning
rather the strength and art displayed in overcoming difficulties, than
any distinct morality of disposition. The bird has kindly and homely
qualities; but its principal "virtue" for _us_, is its being an
incarnate voracity, and that it moves as a consuming and