to beautiful Dian: yes, the spirit of resignation evinces she has powers which shall endure until all material demonstrations are passed away; she shall live and muse eternally: But that tall castle height must fall, The mountain where the golden sun has hid, No noise, no care, no vanity, no strife attend this placid spirit; no haughty passion there. From a base world she wanders away; by streamlet and sequestered grove she steps and watches the gay lark, poised with gallant joys, to chant at Heaven's great gate to angels' ears. A pure ethereal calm glows over her face. Far above the reach of court intrigue, ambition's promises, and lure of gold, mean purposes and vain desires, she asks no joy, but that of virtuous peace, and dares the haughtiest storm of fate to rend that jewel from her breast. She inhabits a temple decked with amaranthine flowers, which no blast can kill; it is built with stones of crystal, through which her piercing eye is ever contemplating heaven. The misery of duplicity, temptation, and human infirmities is now unknown to her; she bids the wild earth roll, for she is shut in with God. She is a revelation of love; a beam of divinity, influencing and shining through those dark clouds which attend the mortal body. She is not compelled to beg her daily happiness from others. "Of God she sings, and of the mild His awful throne for ever smiles; Ready with her white hand to guide, That she may quench them on their way." Her soul is decked with golden light, which glorifies her actions and her friendship; indeed, that nectarian flower, amiability, grows in her path, and even place is dignified by the serenity of her presence. She is a lover of virtue, without austerity; pleasure, without effeminacy, and life without fear of its end; hence it is, she is subject to no disappointments, for her pursuit is truth. This is the ideality of her passion,-to cherish goodness: this is her pride, this her beauty, this her hope, this her life, this her death, and this her epitaph. It is to such we may use those words of the great bard: Thou art alone, If thy rare qualities, sweet gentleness, Thy meekness saint-like, The queen of earthly queens. This is the woman of whom the poet might say : Yet there is light around her brow, A holiness in those dark eyes, Which shows, tho' wand'ring earthward now, Her spirit's home is in the skies. CHAPTER XX. BEAUTY. SOON as the eyes on beauty fondly form, And contemplate each lovely form, Whilst every wish departs, save still to gaze. DANTE. WE have no hesitation in saying that one of the purest sources of intellectual pleasure is the presence of Beauty; for then the spirit finds an object for the exercise of all its powers, and the most agreeable emotions are created: yet it is not wonderful that the variety and inconsistency of our tastes, respecting the attributes and characteristics of any principles, should have led many philosophers to deny the existence of any certain combinations of forms and effects, to ought to be invariably applied. can be more beautiful than the ing the discourse of Plato." Perhaps it would be more intelligible to say, a standard for the beautiful, in its most general acceptation, is not a simple idea, but is made up of a spiritual exquisiteness, a perception of the primary pleasures of imagination, of the secondary pleasures of sense, and of the conclusions of the reasoning faculty. Though men of taste possess a ready perception and lively appreciation of the beautiful, it is not possible that which the term beauty Voltaire says, "Nothing idealities created by read |