a little water in the hollow of your palm; take up a handful of
shore sand; well, these are the elements. What is the beach but acres
of sand? what is the ocean but cubic miles of water? A little more or
a little less signifies nothing." It is the mass that does impress us,
as Niagara does, as the midnight sky does. It is not as parts of this
"astonishing astronomy," or as a "part of the round globe under the
optical sky"--we do not think of that, but the imagination is moved by
the vast sweep of the ocean and its abysmal depths, and its ceaseless
rocking. In some cases we see the All in the little; the law that
spheres a tear spheres a globe. That Nature is seen in leasts is an
old Latin maxim. The soap bubble explains the rainbow. Steam from the
boiling kettle gave Watt the key to the steam engine; but a tumbler of
water throws no light on the sea, though its sweating may help explain
the rain.

Emerson quotes Goethe as saying, "The beautiful is a manifestation of
secret laws of nature which, but for this appearance, had been forever
concealed from us." As if beauty were an objective reality instead of
a subjective experience! As if it were something out there in the
landscape that you may gather your arms full of and bring in! If you
are an artist, you may bring in your vision of it, pass it through
your own mind, and thus embalm and preserve the beauty. Or if you are
a poet, you may have a similar experience and reproduce it, humanized,
in a poem. But the beauty is always a distilled and re-created, or,
shall we say, an incarnated beauty--a tangible and measurable
something, like moisture in the air, or sugar in the trees, or quartz
in the rocks. There is, and can be, no "science of beauty." Beauty,
like truth, is an experience of the mind. It is the emotion you feel
when in health you look from your door or window of a May morning. If
you are ill, or oppressed with grief, or worried, you will hardly
experience the emotion of the beautiful.

Emerson said he was warned by the fate of many philosophers not to
attempt a definition of beauty. But in trying to describe it and
characterize it he ran the same risk. "We ascribe beauty to that which
is simple," he said; "which has no superfluous parts; which exactly
answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean
of many extremes." Is a boot-jack beautiful? Is a crow-bar? Yet these
are simple, they have no superfluous parts, they exactly serve their