RINER

CHAPTER XV.

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS RESPECTING THE THEORETIC FACULTY.

Sec. 1. There are no sources of the emotion of beauty more than those found
in things visible.

Sec. 2. What imperfection exists in visible things. How in a sort by
imagination removable.

Sec. 3. Which however affects not our present conclusions.

Of the sources of beauty open to us in the visible world, we have now
obtained a view which, though most feeble in its grasp and scanty in its
detail, is yet general in its range. Of no other sources than these
visible can we, by any effort in our present condition of existence,
conceive. For what revelations have been made to humanity inspired, or
caught up to heaven of things to the heavenly region belonging, have
been either by unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to
utter, or else by their very nature incommunicable, except in types and
shadows; and ineffable by words belonging to earth, for of things
different from the visible, words appropriated to the visible can convey
no image. How different from earthly gold that clear pavement of the
city might have seemed to the eyes of St. John, we of unreceived sight
cannot know; neither of that strange jasper and sardine can we conceive
the likeness which he assumed that sat on the throne above the crystal
sea; neither what seeming that was of slaying that the Root of David
bore in the midst of the elders; neither what change it was upon the
form of the fourth of them that walked in the furnace of Dura, that even
the wrath of idolatry knew for the likeness of the Son of God. The
knowing that is here permitted to us is either of things outward only,
as in those it is whose eyes faith never opened, or else of that dark
part that her glass shows feebly, of things supernatural, that gleaming
of the Divine form among the mortal crowd, which all may catch if they
will climb the sycamore and wait; nor how much of God's abiding at the
house may be granted to those that so seek, and how much more may be
opened to them in the breaking of bread, cannot be said; but of that
only we can reason which is in a measure revealed to all, of that which
is by constancy and purity of affection to be found in the things and
the beings around us upon earth. Now among all those things whose beauty
we have hitherto examined, there has been a measure of imperfection.
Either inferiority of kind, as the be