graces and attractions. His natural susceptibility in this
direction, enlarged by experience, seems to demand of him an almost
exclusive pre-occupation with the aspects of things; with their
aesthetic character, as it is called--their revelations to the eye
and the imagination: not so much because those aspects of them yield
him the largest amount of enjoyment, as because to be occupied, in
this way, with the aesthetic or imaginative side of things, is to be
in real contact with those elements of his own nature, and of theirs,
which, for him at [26] least, are matter of the most real kind of
appre-hension. As other men are concentrated upon truths of number,
for instance, or on business, or it may be on the pleasures of
appetite, so he is wholly bent on living in that full stream of
refined sensation. And in the prosecution of this love of beauty, he
claims an entire personal liberty, liberty of heart and mind,
liberty, above all, from what may seem conventional answers to first
questions.

But, without him there is a venerable system of sentiment and idea,
widely extended in time and place, in a kind of impregnable
possession of human life--a system, which, like some other great
products of the conjoint efforts of human mind through many
generations, is rich in the world's experience; so that, in attaching
oneself to it, one lets in a great tide of that experience, and
makes, as it were with a single step, a great experience of one's
own, and with great consequent increase to one's sense of colour,
variety, and relief, in the spectacle of men and things. The mere
sense that one belongs to a system--an imperial system or
organisation--has, in itself, the expanding power of a great
experience; as some have felt who have been admitted from narrower
sects into the communion of the catholic church; or as the old Roman