Hence the beautiful is always ideal; that is, it enfolds, embraces,
represents, with more or less success, the idea out of which springs
the object it illuminates: it brilliantly enrobes a germinal
essence. It is thus a sparkling emanation out of the Infinite, and it
leads us thither whence it has come.

Sensibility to the beautiful is thus the light of the whole mind,
illuminating its labors. Without it we work in the dark, and therefore
feebly, defectively. Infer thence the immensity of its function.
Hereby it becomes the chief educator of men and of man; and where its
teaching has not been conspicuous, there no elevation has been
reached. The Greeks and the Hebrews would not have been so deeply, so
greatly, so feelingly known to us, would not have been the pioneers
and inspirers of European civilization, would not have lived on
through thousands of years in the minds of the highest men, had they
not, along with their other rare endowments, possessed, in superior,
in unique quality, this priceless gift of sensibility to the
beautiful. Through this gift Shakespeare is the foremost man of
England, and through it has done more than any other man to educate
and elevate England. Because the Italians of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries were so rich in this gift, therefore it is that
Italy is still a shrine to which the civilized world makes annual
pilgrimage.

The supreme function of this sensibility is to develop, to
educate, to chasten the highest faculties, our vast discourse of
reason, our unselfish aspiration, our deep instinct of truth, our
capacious love. To educate these is its cardinal duty, and lacking
this they remain uneducated. But its beneficent influence is felt
likewise in the less elevated of our efforts. The man who makes shoes,