ecause a kindred vibration in the object sets our own
fibres in motion.

'You resemble the mind which you understand.'

It is a magic bridge from our own mind, making access possible to a
work of art, an electric current conveying the artist's ideas into
our souls.

We know how a drama or a song can thrill us when our feeling vibrates
with it; and that thrill, Faust tells us, is the best part of man.

If inventive work in whatever art or science gives the purest kind of
pleasure, Nature herself seeming to work through the artist, rousing
those impulses which come to him as revelations, there is pleasure
also in the passive reception of beauty, especially when we are not
content to remain passive, but trace out and rethink the artist's
thoughts, remaking his work.

'To invent for oneself is beautiful; but to recognise gladly and
treasure up the happy inventions of others is that less thine?' said
Goethe in his _Jahreszeiten_; and in the _Aphorisms_, confirming what
has just been said: 'We know of no world except in relation to man,
we desire no art but that which is the expression of this relation.'
And, further, 'Look into yourselves and you will find everything, and
rejoice if outside yourselves, as you may say, lies a Nature which
says yea and amen to all that you have found there.'

Certainly Nature only bestows on man in proportion to his own inner
wealth. As Rueckert says, 'the charm of a landscape lies in this, that
it seems to reflect back that part of one's inner life, of mind,
mood, and feeling, which we have given it.' And Ebers, 'Lay down your
best of heart and mind before eternal Nature; she will repay you a
thousandfold, with full hands.'

And Vischer remarks, 'Nature at her greatest is not so great that she
can work without man's mind.' Every landscape can be beautiful and
stimulating if human feeling colours it, and it will be most so to
him who brings the richest endowment of heart and mind to bear:
Nature only discloses her whole self to a whole man.

But it is under the poet's wand above all, that, like the marble at
Pygmalion's breast, she grows warm and breathes and answers to his
charm; as in that symbolic saga, the listening woods and waters and
the creatures followed Orpheus with his lute. Scientific knowledge,
optical, acoustical, meteorological, geological, only widens and
deepens love for her and increases and refines the sense of her
beauty. In short, deep feeling for Nature always p