re
white on one side and golden brown on the other, and trumpet-lip of
gorgeous purple seemed, to my ravished gaze, the very perfection of
beauty. For ages, I thought, that beauteous flower had been growing in
that wild and unvisited spot, every season "filling the air around with
beauty," and had in all probability never met a single human gaze
before. Had, then, all that divinely-formed loveliness been mere waste
for those generations? I asked myself; and I immediately replied, No:
the eye of God himself hath rested on it with satisfaction, and the Lord
hath taken pleasure in this work of His hands.

I shall not make this chapter an essay on the sublime and beautiful, nor
seek to analyse the sense of beauty. It is enough that it is an appetite
of our being, and that most abundantly in nature, on every side, there
is the material of its gratification. So abundantly, indeed, that it
were easy to expand the few pages which I propose to devote to the
subject into a volume, or a dozen volumes, and yet leave untouched vast
treasures of the beautiful in natural history. I must content myself and
my readers with the selection of a few of the more prominent objects in
which this sense is gratified, and with a discrimination of two or three
distinct phases or conditions of existence which contribute, each in its
measure, to give delight to the eyes.

[Illustration: ANTELOPES.]

Among Quadrupeds, there is perhaps less of beauty, strictly considered,
than in most other classes of animals. Elegance of form, however, which
is one phase of it, is seen in the lithe and active squirrel, the pretty
petaurist, and many other of the smaller beasties, and is found in
perfection in the deer and antelopes. Who that has seen a pet fawn
coming to be caressed by a fair girl, but must have had his sense of the
beautiful gratified? Mark the freedom and grace of every motion! See
how it stretches out its pretty meek face and taper neck towards the
hand; its extreme timidity causing its whole body and every limb to
start on the slightest stir from the beholders, while on the least
approach it bounds away in the exuberant playfulness of its little
heart, then stops, and turns, and gazes, and stretches out its neck
again! See when it trots or walks, how high it lifts its little slender
feet, bending its agile limbs as if motion itself were a pleasure! See,
as it stands, with one fore-foot bent up, the hoof nearly touching the
belly; the long grac