described in Eugene Field's "Little Boy Blue":

"The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and staunch he stands,
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket moulds in his hands.
Time was when the little toy dog was new,
And the soldier was passing fair,
And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue
Kissed them and put them there."

Some objects of art may indeed become beautiful almost
completely through their expressiveness. There are certain
poets whose music is raucous and who make little appeal
through clarity of form. These survive almost completely by
virtue of the persistent strength and enduring sublimity of the
ideas which they express. Much of Whitman may be put in
this class, and also much of Browning. Similarly a sculptor
may not captivate us by the fluent beauty of his marble, but
by the power and passion which his crude mighty figures express.
In such cases we may even come to regard what, from
a purely formal point of view, is unlovely, as a thing of the
most extreme beauty. Even the roughness in such direct
revelations of strength, may come to be regarded as elements
of the beautiful. And where massiveness of effect does not
suffice to retrieve a work of art from its essential crudities, we
may still come to accept it as beautiful, as it were, in intention,
and for what comes to be regarded as its essence, namely,
the idea or emotion it expresses. We forgive the imperfections
of form as we forgive the stammerings and stutterings of
persons whose broken sayings are yet full of wisdom.

Usually even where the object, emotion, or idea expressed is
beautiful, we demand certain formal and material elements of
beauty. A telegram may convey the very apex of felicity,
yet be not at all felicitous in its form or in the music of its
words. If in such cases, we speak of beauty, the term is
altogether metaphorical and imputed; we are using it in the
same analogical sense as when we speak of a "beautiful operation"
or a "beautiful deed"; it is a moral rather than an
aesthetic term. We may find the letter of a friend expressive of
the gentleness, fidelity, and charm that have endeared him to
us, but unless these have attained sufficiently clear and explicit
form and determinate unmistakable music, the letter will
have a meaningful beauty only in the light of the peculiar
relation existing between us and the writer. From an impartial
aesthetic point of