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To the full extent of their importance æsthetic faults are punished as truly as those which are made in morals. It is not necessary to award them imprisonment or death, nor has the Creator attached to them the pangs of remorse; but whoever commits them will certainly suffer in the diminution and lack of refinement of his own nature and enjoyments, and also from dissatisfaction and shame upon further experience.

As conscience is the rewarder and punisher of moral rectitude and error, so beauty is the supreme arbiter of all pleasure, enhancing all that it approves, delaying upon agreeable conceptions, and constituting an appropriate reward of every struggle toward excellence the appellate court of happiness, approving of only the higher and purer of agreeable experiences, itself becoming the highest cause, while the criterion, of all delight. It is that faculty whereby we enjoy every form of the good and true, at once the pleasing guide to virtue and symmetry of life, and indispensable to our ideas of the divine perfections. Doubtless in the sight of God all creation is beautiful-because he has made it according to the purpose of his own will; and to man redeemed in heaven this field of happiness must forever continue to expand, as his spirit grows into higher harmony with the divine mind; but while in this state of being we must continue to be limited to objects of which we can comprehend the excellence, and to excellencies we can appreciate. The beautiful of man consists of but glimpses into the beautiful of

God-broken strains of the universal harmony-gleams of the perfection of Deity piercing the darkness of our ignorance and depravity-straggling rays from the daylight of heaven. Plato represented it as the remembrance of what the soul has known in a preëxistent state, while yet a resident of the regions of perfect blessedness, before its confinement in this material prison; and the idea though fanciful, is evidence that he had truly apprehended the nature of that divine power whereby man is elevated so far above all his fellow inhabitants of earth.

PART II.

WE have now arrived at the second general head of our subject—the faculties employed in production and criticism. These are infinitely varied, and of course include the principle already treated; but all that needs to be said in this connection may be arranged under the heads of Taste, Originality, Imitation, Invention, Genius, Talent, Imagination, and Fancy.

CHAPTER I.

OF TASTE.

TASTE, in æsthetic acceptation, is the faculty of criticism. And the office of criticism is to distinguish the beautiful from its opposites, and from all spurious claimants to its honors. The qualifications for this office must be the possession of a delicate susceptibility to the emotion of beauty, and a correct judgment

concerning the real capabilities of things to produce the primary states of mind which always precede that ultimate emotion. In other words, Taste is the combined action of beauty and its intellectual antecedent.

The

If the view of this intellectual sequence were always equally clear and unembarrassed, there would be no occasion to add another word; but many causes operate to prevent a correct judgment upon the real merits of things, as well as to hinder the just development of susceptibility. These have given rise to a variety of opinions on the subject of Taste, as to what it is, and whether all good taste be the same. former of these questions we have already answered, although the full import of that answer can appear only after an examination of the proper objects of Taste. In treating of the latter it is common to employ the term “standard of taste," a phrase which, if it effects any thing at all, must lead astray. For it implies either the setting up of some one person's taste as the model upon which all others are to be shaped, which is unreasonable; or of some one species of excellence to which all others are to conform, which is impossible; or the measurement of the mental faculty by some material scale, which is absurd. And were it possible to establish such a model, or standard, and were it accordingly set up and acknowledged, no person could ever afterward exercise any Taste at all. Every thing bearing the name would be mere submission to authority; on which, by the way, both

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