Those soul-fascinating looks own not the imbecility of objections strike me on first entering upon this theory; set discourse; they tell more than the tongue will con- and after all only one ingredient or constituent of beauty fess. We are all Nereides by nature. The eye is a is explained by it. It is well worthy of investigation, powerful member after all, if we would only acknow-however, as recognizing some fixed principle by which ledge it. Through the eye the soul itself looks forth, our appreciations of the beautiful are governed. and is ever making a soliloquy. The eye daguerreotypes thought. But some will be found who affect to despise beauty, and say, "Beauty is but skin deep." Ah! beauty is a deep, unfathomable truth; it lies deeper than the eye can penetrate after it. Beauty is the deepest thing this earth can boast of, the most profound, the most mysterious. Still they may laugh and laugh on. If they cannot comprehend its deep significance, its sweet, musical voice, its almost eternal meaning, yet will be found many that will sit enchained by that inarticulate stream of melody which ever flows from a thing of beauty. Beauty, its perception, its feeling, to bathe and revel in beauty, is the most complete human delight of which man is capable; and though some have been marred in this pure faculty of enjoyment, by rough contact with a host of unhandsome beings and circumstances, yet sometimes a ray of beauty will pierce to their benighted heart, and send a thrill of joy through their whole being. The man will sometimes catch a faint glimpse of that divinity, and then again be lost in the vortex of utilitarianism. Besides animal beauty there is an immaterial, intellectual, and moral beauty, which will often entrance. We find it in actions, circumstances, and expressions. "Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun and moon come each and look at them once in the steep defile of Thermopyla; Arnold Winkelreid, in the high Alps, under the shadow of an avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears, to break the line for his comrades;"* Rousseau breathes out his soul while gazing in calm contemplation on the glory of the sun: the dying words of Mirabeau were, "Sprinkle me with perfumes, crown me with flowers, that I may thus enter upon eternal sleep." The epitaph of Keats, who lies buried beside the form of the wild, youthful, misjudged Shelley, in the beautiful Protestant cemetery outside the walls of ancient Rome, is according to his desire-" Here lies one whose name was writ in water;" of Dante, "Hic claudor Dantes patriis extorris aboris." But to dip fairly into the beauties of poetry of expression, would prove a vain attempt now. Many and varied are the attempts which have been made to philosophise upon beauty; but, for the most part, unsatisfactory and conflicting theories only have resulted. Alison and Jeffreys thought they had explained all by saying that beauty resides only in a man's mind, is, in fact, nothing at all but a sentiment : so that a thing is beautiful or not just as it is thought to be so. But there is a beauty in form independent of every man's conceits and fancies. I can imagine a form which would captivate the whole world by its transcendant beauty. The Venus de Medici, and some other of the productions of ancient sculptors, may be taken as approaches to this. There are countenances to be met with in the world even now, which no man living would dare to call other than beautiful. There are things and situations in this world of ours, which the most obtuse and crochetty of us could not forbear terming beautiful. Latterly we have had a new theory, propounded by a Mr. Hay, of Edinburgh, which may be fitly called the musical theory. He proposes to make beauty a geometrical science, like music. The basis of the theory is, "that a figure is pleasing to the eye in the same degree as its fundamental angles bear to each other the same proportions that the vibrations bear to one another in the common chords of music." Numerous • Emerson. There is something singularly fine and poetic, and also suggestive of much truth, in the ancient philosophy of beauty. It taught "that the soul of man embodied here on earth, went roaming up and down in quest of that other world of its own out of which it came into this; but was soon stupified by the light of the natural sun, and unable to see any other objects but those of this world, which are but shadows of real things. There fore the deity sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of the beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and fair." A somewhat similar idea is thus beautifully expressed by M. F. Tupper : Verily the fancy may be false, yet it hath met me in my musings, (As expounding the pleasantness of pleasure, yet noways e tenuating license), That even those yearnings after beauty in wayward want youth, upon When, guileless of ulterior ends, it craveth but to look the lovely, Seem like struggles of the soul, dimly remembering pre-existence, And feeling in its blindness for a long-lost God, to satis longing. The love of beauty is an instinct implanted in the soul. It craveth "but to look upon the lovely." Thị in whom this earnest love of the beautiful has bett cultivated and developed, will find in beauty more th a toy to be played with. It seems something m than mere tinsel and overcast ornament. It is developed thought of God. It bears the impress dá Deity. Beauty is true nature-what nature have been altogether, had not sin marred it. "B should be the dowry of every man and woman as 2 variably as sensation; but it is rare." Why? Beca what God hath created the devil has mutilated. Bea in its universal sense, and applied not merely to things material, but to deeds and thoughts, is the connecting link between man and his Maker: it is that which typifies His supreme beauty and loveliness who created the earth once in purity. All the most refined pleasures and enjoyments of human life may be summed up in these words, which are significant of ideas the grandest and most profound, yet withal the most undefinable and least understood in the vocabulary of humanity, Truth, Beauty, and Love These three we find singularly related and linked together; Love is the most beautiful of the affections, and the most truthful, truest to nature-it is never repented of. Beauty is everywhere loveable; love is essentially beautiful. Beauty cannot exist without truth: no trus but is beautiful. Beauty then is Truth, or rather attribute; and in this is comprehended our philosophy of the beautiful. If it were not for the beauty of the creature, what true relationships could be found to i Creator? But in so far as it is beautiful mentally well as physically, it truly and genuinely answers the purpose of its being. That which is beautiful agrees with the thought of God-God creates beauty on Beauty is the shadow of God-anything that is n beautiful is a base counterfeit engrafted on that one: fair creation by sin and Satan. Beauty is truth, for is the sole manifestation of the God of truth. The just the right, the good, is the beautiful:* that is a fine re mark of Emerson, that beauty ever steals in like a and envelopes noble actions. There is an observation of Coleridge too, which bears upon this point, carrying out the idea even to beauty of expression. It is, th whenever you find a sentence musically worded, of rhythm and melody in the words, there is something • Somebody has said that beauty is the highest form of att deep and good in the meaning too. Let us cultivate the beautiful, therefore, in its widest sense, and the love of it, that we may answer the end of life. To conclude in the words of one of the most earnest lovers of beauty, Percy Bysshe Shelley For love and beauty and delight There is no death nor change; their might No light, being themselves obscure, DECIUS. [The Roman consul who devoted himself, as his father had done, to death to save his country by offering himself to the Manes]. Beneath great Vesta's mountain Was sound of battle clang; Far o'er the distant ocean The brazen clamour rang. Red flame of the lava torrent And men for death arrayed: In vain the Roman falchion Cleaves the proud Samnites' shield; In vain the serried phalanx Drives o'er the bloody field; In vain the Roman pilum The grey old consul fights. The volcan casts a glow Its fiery tongues, all flaming, Bright as Jove's arrowy leven, Leap up to reach the golden sun, And blot it from the heaven. Mars smiles not on his banner, Amid the weapons' jar; On unbroke ranks the grim god's wolf "Would he that smote the Samnite, Would break their serried rank! Would that their steeds were plunging In Pontus' marshes dank!" "There's vengeance in the heaven; 'Twas shuddered at in hell When, in the pride of conquest, Titus, the hero, fell!" "Peace, cowards!" cries the consul; "Look at yon heaven above; No victim ever slaughtered So pleased the mighty Jove. On with thy comrades, on! • Vesuvius. "Up, up, ye warriors, kneeling, As nearer roars the strife. We heed no sneer from thee; In vain with glance of anger Then veiled his old and scarred brow He stood and breathed a moment's prayer, "O, ye nine gods of Hades That rule in bell below, "Hear me, great sun! whose parting ray Great monarch Jove, thou crowned one, The consul bent his aged head, "Go, tell my brother consul How an aged warrior died, How he went like a youthful bridegroom "Crowned with the wreaths of glory He wore in the days of yore, Like the waves upon a diver, Their dark ranks closed him in; They see his white robe waving Amid the battle din. While still the sun was setting Up in the crimson skies, G. W. THORNBURY. ROBBERS. ROBBERS!-there cannot be a more suggestive word! How full it is of romance and reality, hair-breadth 'scapes, rich booty, reckless daring, the untrammelled freedom of the wild woods-ay, and the dungeon's gloom-and death. "Clan Alpine's warriors true" came trooping to their chief's bugle-call no faster than the phantoms of lawless livers rise up before our mind's eye and marshal themselves in lengthened files at the bare whisper of the word. From the Forty splendid oriental rascals who carried on their operations with a coup de main, and kept a cave full of barbaric pearl and gold as a sort of country-house, bequeathed to them by their predecessors, for the ultimate enrichment of Ali Baba and his maid-down to the sorriest foot-pad who ever cried "stand!" to a solitary wayfarer on Finchley-common or ended his career on Tyburn-tree-they are all before us the picturesque Italian bandit and the fierce German outlaw hob-a-nobbing with our own famous but prosaic knights of the road and the lively Arnaout robber. To say truth, of all the company we have least liking for our own countrymen-there is only one gentlemen amongst them, the chivaleresque Duval; all the rest are graceless plunderers: and we would much rather hear the whizz through our whiskers of a Tyrolese carbine-ball than be pounced upon from behind a hedge-as Don Juan was-with (we omit the English shibboleth) "your money or your life!" We would willingly resign all we ever possessed, or are likely to possess, to have been waylaid in such a pass and by such assailants as Hassan Bey was Above, the mountain rears a peak Where vultures whet the thirsty beak- Shall tempt them down ere morning's light;- Had shrunk before the summer beam, And left a channel bleak, and bare Save shrubs that spring to perish there. it may be a weakness-amiable or otherwise-but it The shivering sabres' bickering jar, And pealing wide or ringing near, And had we had the luck to have been born with race of the Arnaouts of Berat, was the fiftieth on the same errand, and declined. 'Well, effendi,' quoth he, may you live! you would have found me useful. Í shall leave the town for the hills to-morrow; in the winter I return-perhaps you will then receive me.' Dervish, who was present, remarked, as a thing of course and of no consequence, in the meantime he will join the klepthes (robbers);' which was true to the letter. If not cut off they come down in the winter, and pass it unmolested in some town, where they are often as well known as their exploits." Here was a romantic robber!-not one who cut men's throats or purses i' the dark, but carried on his calling in the light of day and with the bold hand of a mountaineer. But one rarely or never hears of such things now-adays; and it may be almost said that even that prolific land of bandittiori, Italy, has seen the last of the robbers. A JUNE EVENING. In spreading circles all around, Each hill a fading cloudland seems; On Nature's bosom-full of dreams! Like passion's whisper-low and deep; Breathes softly as a child asleep: And all the universe o'erflows With the deep tenderness of God. Shall there be none to bless thee? ob, blessed summer even! Shall there be none to bless thee? that givest to ou Earth walking in the borrowed robes of heaven, Yea, there are those shall bless thee well By the bourne side, or down the dell, Shall they not give thee gladsome greeting? A deeper beauty such shall view On thy fair face, than others ken, Oh, blessed summer night!-would that my blessing All things can give the glory that they view. God give them joy of thee, oh, blessed night! God give them joy of thee, that through the years Thy memory welling freshly up may be Perennial in their hearts; then though no more Though drowning thy sweet songs, I hear the roar J. J. C. N. Notes to The Giaour. |