is surely
due to the almost constant recognition of the beautiful. I do not know
that I could say with the poet,--

"A thing of beauty is a joy _for ever_;"

but certainly it is a joy as long as it endures; and the naturalist
finds an endless recurrence of things of beauty. Birds, insects, shells,
zoophytes, flowers, sea-weeds, are all redundant of beauty; and all the
classes of natural objects, though not in an equal degree, nor
manifestly in every individual object, yet possess it as a prominent
element. Indeed, from the profusion with which loveliness is sown
broadcast over the works of God, I have often thought, though it is not
directly revealed, that a sense of the beautiful and a complacency in
it, altogether independent of fitness for certain ends, or the uses
which may be subserved, is an attribute of the Holy One Himself, and
that our perception of it is the reflection of His--a part of that image
of God in which man was created, and which sin has not wholly
obliterated. I know that God may have clothed His works with beauty for
other admiring eyes than man's; and that it is probable that the holy
angels may be far more conversant with creation than we are with all our
researches,--that the ten thousand times ten thousand flowers which are
"born to blush unseen" by _man_, may be seen and admired by "ten
thousand times ten thousand" angels,[203] and thus the tribute of praise
for their perfection may be ever ascending before Him whose hands made
them for His glory. We may allow this; and yet with reverence presume
that His own pure eyes look upon the lilies' array with a delight in
their mere loveliness, infinitely greater than that which men, or even
angels, take in it, seeing it is written,--"for thy pleasure they are,
and were created."

I remember being struck, and somewhat awed, too, with a thought of this
kind, once, when, pushing my way through a very dense and tangled
thicket in a lone and lofty mountain region of Jamaica, sufficiently
remote from the dwellings of man to render it probable that no civilized
human foot had penetrated thither before. I suddenly came upon a most
magnificent terrestrial orchid in full blossom. It was _Phajus
Tankervilliae_,--a noble plant, which from the midst of broad leaves
growing out of a mass of green bulbs, had thrown up its stout
blossom-stems to the height of a yard or more, crowned with the
pyramidal spike of lily-like flowers, whose expanding petals of pu