d bottom; and hence their
life and literature are not strong and manifold, although in both
there are exhibitions of that refinement which only comes of
sensibility to the beautiful. The Chinese, on the other hand, are
wanting in this sensibility; hence their prosaic, finite civilization.
But most noteworthy is the contrast between them in religious
development. In that of the Hindoos there was expansion, vastness,
self-merging in infinitude; the Chinese are religiously contracted,
petty, idolatrous; a contrast which I venture to ascribe, in large
measure, to the presence in the one case, and the absence in the
other, of the inspiration of the beautiful.

To the same effect individual examples might be cited innumerable.
Look at Wordsworth and Byron, both preeminent for sensibility to the
beautiful; but, from deep diverseness in other leading mental gifts,
the one, through the light of this vivifying power, became a poet of
the propensities and the understanding, a poet of passion and wit; the
other, a poet of the reason, a poet of nature and meditative emotion.

To do their best the moral feelings, too, need the light and inward
stimulus of the beautiful; but if these feelings are by nature
weak, no strength or intensity of the sense of beauty will have power
to get from a mind thus deficient high moral thought or action. If
there be present the accomplishment of verse, we shall have a Byron;
or, the other poetic gifts in full measure, with lack of this
accomplishment, and we may get a Beckford, who builds Fonthill Abbeys,
and with purity and richness of diction describes palaces, actual or
feigned, and natural scenery with picturesqueness and genial glow; or,
the intellectual endowments being mediocre, we shall have merely a man
of superficial taste; or, the moral regents being ineffective, an
intellectual sybarite, or a refined voluptuary. Like the sun, the
beautiful shines on healthful field and poisonous fen; and her warmth
will even make flowers to bloom in the fen, but it is not in her to
make them bear refreshing odors or nourishing fruit.

As men have body, intellect, and moral natures, so is there physical,
intellectual, and spiritual beauty, and each distinct from the others.
Take first a few examples from the domain of art. The body and limbs
of the Gladiator in the Louvre may be cited as the exponent of
corporeal beauty; the face of the Apollo Belvedere as that of
intellectual and physical; and the Santo