Thus beauty only becomes visible--I might say only becomes actual--by
the fire kindled through the meeting of a perfection out of us and an
inward appetite therefor. And it is the flaming of this fire, thus
kindled, that lights up to us the whole world wherein we live, the
inward and the outward. This fire unlighted, and on the face of nature
there is darkness, in our own minds there is darkness. For though all
nature teems with the essence and the outward mold of beauty, to the
unkindled mind beauty is no more present then was Banquo's ghost to
the guests of Macbeth. Macbeth's individual conscience made him see
the ghost; nay, by a creative potency summoned it: and so is beauty
created there where, without what I may call the æsthetic conscience,
it no more exists than do the glories of Titian and Claude to the
affectionate spaniel who follows his master into a picture-gallery. To
the quadruped, by the organic limitation of his nature, dead forever
is this painted life. By the organic boundlessness of _his_ nature,
man can grasp the life of creation in its highest, its finest, its
grandest manifestations; and from these beauty is indivisible.
Wherever the divine energy is most subtle and expressive, there glows
ever, in its celestial freshness, the beautiful.

Beauty is the happiest marriage between the invisible and the visible.
It may be termed the joyfullest look of God. Blessed is he who can
watch and reflect this radiant look. The faculties of such a one
become fortified by creative influx. Through the exquisite shock of
the beautiful he reaps an accession of mental magnetism. Thus through
the beautiful we commune the most directly with the divine; and, other
things being equal, to the degree that men respond to, are thrilled
by, this vivacity of divine presence, as announced by the beautiful,
to that degree are they elevated in the scale of being.