bute. Why do we this? To
make it a _whole_,--not to the eye, but to the mind.

Nor is this general disposition to find a coincidence between a fair
exterior and moral excellence altogether unsupported by facts of, at
least, a partial realization. For, though a perfect correspondence
cannot be looked for in a state where all else is imperfect, he
is most unfortunate who has never met with many, and very near,
approximations to the desired union. But we have a still stronger
assurance of their predetermined affinity in the peculiar activity of
this desire where there is no such approximation. For example, when we
meet with an instance of the higher virtues in an unattractive form,
how natural the wish that that form were beautiful! So, too, on
beholding a beautiful person, how common the wish that the mind
it clothed were also good! What are these wishes but unconscious
retrospects to our primitive nature? And why have we them, if they be
not the workings of that universal law, which gathers to itself all
scattered affinities, bodying them forth in the never-ending forms of
harmony,--in the flower, in the tree, in the bird, and the animal,--if
they be not the evidence of its continuous, though fruitless, effort
to evolve too in _man_ its last consummate work, by the perfect
confluence of the body and the spirit? In this universal yearning (for
it seems to us no less) to connect the physical with its appropriate
moral,--to say nothing of the mysterious intuition that points to
the appropriate,--is there not something like a clew to what was
originally natural? And, again, in the never-ceasing strivings of the
two great elements of our being, each to supply the deficiencies of
the other, have we not also an intimation of something that _once
was_, that is now lost, and would be recovered? Surely there must
be more in this than a mere concernment of Art;--if, indeed, there be
not in Art more of the prophetic than we are now aware of. To us
it seems that this irrepressible desire to find the good in the
beautiful, and the beautiful in the good, implies an end, both
beyond and above the trifling present; pointing to deep and dark
questions,--to no less than where the mysteries which surround us will
meet their solution. One great mystery we see in part resolving itself
here. We see the deformities of the body sometimes giving place to
its glorious tenant. Some of us may have witnessed this, and felt
the spiritual presence gai