so perfect, so finely fashioned to all beautiful uses! Let other people
go through the toil to acquire; their aim is truth: but here is beauty in
its quintessence, and what is beauty but three parts of truth? Beauty is
harmony with the universal order, a revelation of laws and perfections of
which, in our common groping through a dull world, we find in general
nothing to remind us. And if so, what folly to ask of a human creature
that it should be more than beautiful! It is a messenger from the gods,
and we treat it as if it were any common traveller along the highway of
life, and cross-examine it for its credentials instead of raising our
altar and sacrificing to it with grateful hearts!

'That was my latest impression of Friday night. But, naturally, by
Saturday morning I had returned to the rational point of view. The mind's
morning climate is removed by many degrees from that of the evening; and
the critical revolt which the whole spectacle of the _White Lady_ had
originally roused in me revived in all its force. I began, indeed, to
feel as if I and humanity, with its long laborious tradition, were on one
side, holding our own against a young and arrogant aggressor--namely,
beauty, in the person of Miss Bretherton! How many men and women, I
thought, have laboured and struggled and died in the effort to reach a
higher and higher perfection in one single art, and are they to be
outdone, eclipsed in a moment, by something which is a mere freak of
nature, something which, like the lilies of the field, has neither toiled
nor spun, and yet claims the special inheritance and reward of those who
have! It seemed to me as though my feeling in her presence of the night
before, as if the sudden overthrow of the critical resistance in me had
been a kind of treachery to the human cause. Beauty has power enough, I
found myself reflecting with some fierceness,--let us withhold from her a
sway and a prerogative which are not rightfully hers; let us defend
against her that store of human sympathy which is the proper reward, not