an.

3. There is still another aspect under which the beauty of the world
may be viewed, namely, as it becomes an object of the intellect.
Beside the relation of things to virtue, they have a relation to thought.
The intellect searches out the absolute order of things as they stand
in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection. The
intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and
the exclusive activity of the one, generates the exclusive activity of
the other. There is something unfriendly in each to the other, but
they are like the alternate periods of feeding and working in animals;
each prepares and will be followed by the other. Therefore does
beauty, which, in relation to actions, as we have seen, comes
unsought, and comes because it is unsought, remain for the
apprehension and pursuit of the intellect; and then again, in its turn,
of the active power. Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally
reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and
not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world;
some men even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have
the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they
seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art.

The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of
humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is
the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the
works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the
expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms
radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the
ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common
to them all,--that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard
of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms,--the totality of nature;
which the Italians expressed by defining beauty "il piu nell' uno."
Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the
whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this
universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the
architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one
point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty
which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed
through the alembic of man. Thus in art, d