it is unquestioned that in words, and in words alone, can we
get nearest to the inexpressible. Then literature, as being
the most expressive, would be the highest art, and we should be
confronted with a hierarchy of arts, from that down.

Now, in truth, the real lover of beauty knows that no one art
is superior to another. "Each in his separate star," they reign
alone. In order to be equal, they must depend on their material,
not on that common quality of imaginative thought which each has
in a differing degree, and all less than literature.

The idea, we conclude, is then indeed subordinate,--a by-product,
unless by chance it can enter into, melt into, the form. This
case we have clearest in the example, already referred to, of
the gold-embroidered gauntlet, or the jeweled chalice,--say the
Holy Grail in Abbey's pictures,--which counts more or less, in
the spatial balance, according to its intrinsic interest.

We have seen that through sympathetic reproduction a certain
mood is produced, which becomes a kind of emotional envelope
for the picture,--a favorable stimulation of the whole, a
raising of the whole harmony one tone, as it were. Now the
further ideal content of the picture may so closely belong to
this basis that it helps it along. Thus all that we know about
dawn--not only of a summer morning--helps us to see, and seeing
to rejoice, in Corot's silvery mist or Monet's iridescent
shimmers. All that we know and feel about the patient majesty
of labor in the fields, next the earth, helps us to get the
slow, large rhythm, the rich gloom of Millet's pictures. But
it is the rhythm and the gloom that are the beauty, and the