ill we cannot imagine any one gifted with reason and
sensibility to be entirely destitute of it. It is an element of reason
and of sense peculiar to man. As a fabulist once represented a cock in
quest of barleycorns, scraping for his breakfast, saying to himself, on
discovering a precious and brilliant gem: 'If a lapidary were in my
place he would now have made his fortune; but as for myself, I prefer
one grain of barley to all the precious stones in the world.'

But what man, so feeling and thinking, would not 'blush and hang his
head to think himself a man'? Apart from the value of the gem, every man
of reason or of thought has pleasure in the contemplation of the
beautiful diamond, whether on his own person or on that of another.
Taste seems to be as inseparable from reason as Poetry is from
imagination. It is not wholly the gift of Nature, nor wholly the gift of
Art. It is an innate element of the human constitution, designed to
beautify and beatify man. To cultivate and improve it is an essential
part of education. The highest civilization known in Christendom is but
the result or product of good taste. Even religion and morality, in
their highest excellence, are but, so far as society is concerned,
developments and demonstrations of cultivated taste. There may, indeed,
be a fictitious or chimerical taste without Poetry or Religion; but a
genuine good taste, in our judgment, without these handmaids, is
unattainable.

But as no interesting landscape--no mountain, hill, or valley, no river,
lake or sea--affords us all that charms, excites or elevates our
imagination viewed from any one point of vision, so the poetic faculty
itself can neither be conceived of nor appreciated, contemplated out of
its own family register.

There is in all the 'Fine Arts' a common paternity, and hence a family
lineage and a family likeness. To appreciate any one of them we must
form an acquaintance with the whole sisterhood--Poetry, Music, Painting,
and Sculpture.

And are not all these the genuine offspring of Imagination? Hence they
are of one paternity, though not of one maternity. The eye, the ear, and
the hand, has each its own peculiar sympathetic nerve. For, as all God's
works are perfect, when and where He gives an eye to see or an ear to
hear, He gives a hand to execute. This is the law; and as all God's laws
are universal as perfect, there is no exception save from accident, or
from something poetically styled a _lusus natu