and the glory of Him in whom they
rejoice and we live, dispense yet such kind influences and so much of
material blessing as to be joyfully felt by all inferior creatures, and
to be desired by them with such single desire as the imperfection of
their nature may admit;[5] that the strong torrents which, in their own
gladness fill the hills with hollow thunder and the vales with winding
light, have yet their bounden charge of field to feed and barge to bear;
that the fierce flames to which the Alp owes its upheaval and the
volcano its terror, temper for us the metal vein and quickening spring;
and that for our incitement, I say not our reward, for knowledge is its
own reward, herbs have their healing, stones their preciousness, and
stars their times.

Sec. 9. Their relative dignities.

Sec. 10. How reversed through erring notions of the contemplative and
imaginative faculties.

It would appear, therefore, that those pursuits which are altogether
theoretic, whose results are desirable or admirable in themselves and
for their own sake, and in which no farther end to which their
productions or discoveries are referred, can interrupt the contemplation
of things as they are, by the endeavor to discover of what selfish uses
they are capable (and of this order are painting and sculpture), ought
to take rank above all pursuits which have any taint in them of
subserviency to life, in so far as all such tendency is the sign of less
eternal and less holy function.[6] And such rank these two sublime arts
would indeed assume in the minds of nations, and become objects of
corresponding efforts, but for two fatal and widespread errors
respecting the great faculties of mind concerned in them.

The first of these, or the theoretic faculty, is concerned with the
moral perception and appreciation of ideas of beauty. And the error
respecting it is the considering and calling it aesthetic, degrading it
to a mere operation of sense, or perhaps worse, of custom, so that the
arts which appeal to it sink into a mere amusement, ministers to morbid
sensibilities, ticklers and fanners of the soul's sleep.

The second great faculty is the imaginative, which the mind exercises in
a certain mode of regarding or combining the ideas it has received from
external nature, and the operations of which become in their turn
objects of the theoretic faculty to other minds.

[Illustration: COURT OF THE DUCAL PALACE, VENICE. From a drawing by
Rus