narrow ideas tell of the Highest Being? Should I, like a Turk, name it
with a hundred names, I should still fall short, and, in comparison
with the infinite attributes, have said nothing."

We have called the beautiful the light of the mind; but there must be
mind to be illuminated. If your torch be waved in a chamber set round
with bits of granite and slate and pudding-stone, you will get no
luminous reverberation. But brandish it before rubies and emeralds and
diamonds! The qualities in the mind must be precious, in order that
the mind become radiant through beauty. To take a broad example.

The Hindoos in their organization have a fine sense of the
beautiful, but they lack mental breadth and bottom; and hence their
life and literature are not strong and manifold, although in both
there are exhibitions of that refinement which only comes of
sensibility to the beautiful. The Chinese, on the other hand, are
wanting in this sensibility; hence their prosaic, finite civilization.
But most noteworthy is the contrast between them in religious
development. In that of the Hindoos there was expansion, vastness,
self-merging in infinitude; the Chinese are religiously contracted,
petty, idolatrous; a contrast which I venture to ascribe, in large
measure, to the presence in the one case, and the absence in the
other, of the inspiration of the beautiful.

To the same effect individual examples might be cited innumerable.
Look at Wordsworth and Byron, both preeminent for sensibility to the
beautiful; but, from deep diverseness in other leading mental gifts,
the one, through the light of this vivifying power, became a poet of
the propensities and the understanding, a poet of passion and wit; the
other, a poet of the reason, a poet of nature and meditative emotion.