yself to bear, but merely on
their actual and demonstrable agreeableness, so that, in the present
case, while I assert positively, and have no fear of being able to
prove, that a curve of any kind is more beautiful than a right line, I
leave it to the reader to accept or not, as he pleases, that reason of
its agreeableness, which is the only one that I can at all trace,
namely, that every curve divides itself infinitely by its changes of
direction.

Sec. 15. How constant in external nature.

That all forms of acknowledged beauty are composed exclusively of curves
will, I believe, be at once allowed; but that which there will be need
more especially to prove, is the subtilty and constancy of curvature in
all natural forms whatsoever. I believe that, except in crystals, in
certain mountain forms admitted for the sake of sublimity or contrast,
(as in the slope of debris,) in rays of light, in the levels of calm
water and alluvial land, and in some few organic developments, there are
no lines nor surfaces of nature without curvature, though as we before
saw in clouds, more especially in their under lines towards the horizon,
and in vast and extended plains, right lines are often suggested which
are not actual. Without these we could not be sensible of the value of
the contrasting curves, and while, therefore, for the most part, the eye
is fed in natural forms with a grace of curvature which no hand nor
instrument can follow, other means are provided to give beauty to those
surfaces which are admitted for contrast, as in water by its reflection
of the gradations which it possesses not itself. In freshly-broken
ground, which nature has not yet had time to model, in quarries and
pits which are none of her cutting, in those convulsions and evidences
of convulsion, of whose influence on ideal landscape I shall presently
have occasion to speak, and generally in all ruin and disease, and
interference of one order of being with another, (as in the cattle line
of park trees,) the curves vanish, and violently opposed or broken and
unmeaning lines take their place.

Sec. 16. The beauty of gradation.

What curvature is to lines, gradation is to shades and colors. It is
_there_ infinity, and divides them into an infinite number of degrees.
Absolutely, without gradation no natural surface can possibly be, except
under circumstances of so rare conjunction as to amount to a lusus
naturae; for we have seen that few surfaces are with