impossible for any of us to understand, from beginning to
end, that agreement of harmonious circumstances that
creates in us the highest pleasure of admiration, precisely
because some of these circumstances are hidden from us for
ever in the constitution of our own bodies. After we have
reckoned up all that we can see or hear or feel, there
still remains to be taken into account some sensibility
more delicate than usual in the nerves affected, or some
exquisite refinement in the architecture of the brain,
which is indeed to the sense of the beautiful as the eye or
the ear to the sense of hearing or sight. We admire
splendid views and great pictures; and yet what is truly
admirable is rather the mind within us, that gathers
together these scattered details for its delight, and
snakes out of certain colours, certain distributions of
graduated light and darkness, that intelligible whole which
alone we call a picture or a view. Hazlitt, relating in
one of his essays how he went on foot from one great man's
house to another's in search of works of art, begins
suddenly to triumph over these noble and wealthy owners,
because he was more capable of enjoying their costly
possessions than they were; because they had paid the money
and he had received the pleasure. And the occasion is a
fair one for self-complacency. While the one man was
working to be able to buy the picture, the other was
working to be able to enjoy the picture. An inherited
aptitude will have been diligently improved in either case;
only the one man has made for himself a fortune, and the
other has made for himself a living spirit. It is a fair
occasion for self-complacency, I repeat, when the event