mmetrical
order and strength of the spines, the fresh and even color of the body,
are looked for earnestly as signs of healthy condition, our pain is
increased by their absence, and indefinitely increased if blotches, and
other appearances of bruise and decay interfere with that little life
which the plant seems to possess.

The same singular characters belong in animals to the crustacea, as to
the lobster, crab, scorpion, etc., and in great measure deprive them of
the beauty which we find in higher orders, so that we are reduced to
look for their beauty to single parts and joints, and not to the whole
animal.

Sec. 5. This sympathy is unselfish, and does not regard utility.

Now I wish particularly to impress upon the reader that all these
sensations of beauty in the plant arise from our unselfish sympathy with
its happiness, and not from any view of the qualities in it which may
bring good to us, nor even from our acknowledgment in it of any moral
condition beyond that of mere felicity; for such an acknowledgment,
belongs to the second operation of the theoretic faculty (compare Sec. 2,)
and not to the sympathetic part which we are at present examining; so
that we even find that in this respect, the moment we begin to look upon
any creature as subordinate to some purpose out of itself, some of the
sense of organic beauty is lost. Thus, when we are told that the leaves
of a plant are occupied in decomposing carbonic acid, and preparing
oxygen for us, we begin to look upon it with some such indifference as
upon a gasometer. It has become a machine; some of our sense of its
happiness is gone; its emanation of inherent life is no longer pure. The
bending trunk, waving to and fro in the wind above the waterfall, is
beautiful because it is happy, though it is perfectly useless to us. The
same trunk, hewn down and thrown across the stream, has lost its beauty.
It serves as a bridge,--it has become useful; it lives not for itself,
and its beauty is gone, or what it retains is purely typical, dependent
on its lines and colors, not on its functions. Saw it into planks, and
though now adapted to become permanently useful, its whole beauty is
lost forever, or to be regained only in part when decay and ruin shall
have withdrawn it again from use, and left it to receive from the hand
of nature the velvet moss and varied lichen, which may again suggest
ideas of inherent happiness, and tint its mouldering sides with hues of
life