nd fro on grass or heather, the whole fashion of the
landscape has been changed for him, as though the sun had just broken
forth, or a great artist had only then completed, by some cunning touch,
the composition of the picture! And not only a change of posture--a
snatch of perfume, the sudden singing of a bird, the freshness of some
pulse of air from an invisible sea, the light shadow of a travelling
cloud, the merest nothing that sends a little shiver along the most
infinitesimal nerve of a man's body--not one of the least of these but
has a hand somehow in the general effect, and brings some refinement of
its own into the character of the pleasure we feel.

And if the external conditions are thus varied and subtle, even more so
are those within our own bodies. No man can find out the world, says
Solomon, from beginning to end, because the world is in his heart; and
so it is impossible for any of us to understand, from beginning to end,
that agreement of harmonious circumstances that creates in us the
highest pleasure of admiration, precisely because some of these
circumstances are hidden from us for ever in the constitution of our own
bodies. After we have reckoned up all that we can see or hear or feel,
there still remains to be taken into account some sensibility more
delicate than usual in the nerves affected, or some exquisite refinement
in the architecture of the brain, which is indeed to the sense of the
beautiful as the eye or the ear to the sense of hearing or sight. We
admire splendid views and great pictures; and yet, what is truly
admirable is rather the mind within us, that gathers together these
scattered details for its delight, and makes out of certain colours
certain distributions of graduated light and darkness, that intelligible
whole which alone we call a picture or a view. Hazlitt, relating in one
of his essays how he went on foot from one great man's house to
another's in search of works of art, begins suddenly to triumph over
these noble and wealthy owners, because he was more capable of enjoying
their costly possessions than they were; because they had paid the money
and he had received the pleasure. And the occasion is a fair one for
self-complacency. While the one man was working to be able to buy the
picture, the other was working to be able to enjoy the picture. An
inherited aptitude will have been diligently improved in either case;
only the one man has made for himself a fortune, and the ot