Those marring specks of evil, which the sensual cannot see;
Therefore is he proof against a face, unlovely to his likings,

And common minds shall scorn the taste, that shrunk from sin's distortion

THERE is a beauty of the reason: grandly independent of externals,
It looketh from the windows of the house, shining in the man triumphant
I have seen the broad blank face of some misshapen dwarf

Lit on a sudden as with glory, the brilliant light of mind:

Who then imagined him deformed intelligence is blazing on his forehead, There is empire in his eye, and sweetness on his lip, and his brown cheek glittereth with beauty :

And I have known some Nireus of the camp, a varnished paragon of chamberers, (7)

Fine, elegant, and shapely, moulded as the master-piece of Phidias,— Such an one, with intellects abased, have I noted crouching to the dwarf, Whilst his lovers scorn the fool whose beauty hath departed!

AND there is a beauty for the spirit; mind in its perfect flowering,
Fragrant, expanded into soul, full of love and blessed.

Go to some squalid couch, some famishing deathbed of the poor;

He is shrunken, cadaverous, diseased;—there is here no beauty of the body.

Never hath he fed on knowledge, nor drank at the streams of science,

He is of the common herd, illiterate;—there is here no beauty of the reason But lo! his filming eye is bright with love from heaven,

In every look it beameth praise, as worshipping with seraphs;

What honeycomb is hived upon his lips, eloquent of gratitude and prayer,—
What triumph shrined serene upon that clammy brow,

What glory flickering transparent under those thin cheeks,—
What beauty in his face!—Is it not the face of an angel?

Now, of these three, infinitely mingled and combined,
Consisteth human beauty, in all the marvels of its mightiness:
And forth from human beauty springeth the intensity of Love;
Feeling, thought, desire, the three deep fountains of affection.
Son of Adam, or daughter of Eve, art thou trapped by nature,
And is thy young eye dazzled with the pleasant form of beauty?

This is but a lower love; still it hath its honour;

What God hath made and meant to charm, let not man despise.
Nevertheless, as reason's child, look thou wisely farther,

For age, disease, and care, and sin, shall tarnish all the surface;
Reach a loftier love; be lured by the comeliness of mind,—
Gentle, kind, and calm, or lustrous in the livery of knowledge.
And more there is a higher grade; force the mind to its perfection,-
Win those golden trophies of consummate love:

Add unto riches of the reason, and a beauty moulded to thy liking,
The precious things of nobler grace that well adorn a soul;
Thus, be thou owner of a treasure, great in earth and heaven,
Beauty, wisdom, goodness,-in a creature like its God.

So then, draw we to an end; with feeble step and faltering.
I follow beauty through the universe, and find her home Uhiquity:
In all that God hath made, in all that man hath marred,

Lingereth beauty or its wreck, a broken mould and castings.

And now, having wandered long time, freely and with desultory feet,
To gather in the garden of the world a few fair sample flowers,
With patient scrutinizing care let us cull the conclusion of their essence,
And answer to the riddle of Zorobabel, Whence the might of beauty. (8)

UGLINESS is native unto nothing, but possible abstract evil :
In every thing created, at its worst, lurk the dregs of loveliness.
We be fallen into utter depths, yet once we stood sublime,
For man was made in perfect praise, his Maker's comely image:
And so his new-born ill is spiced with older good,

He carrieth with him, yea, to crime, the withered limbs of beauty.

Passions may be crooked generosities; the robber stealeth for his children ; Murder was avenger of the innocent, or wiped out shame with blood.

Many virtues, weighted by excess, sink among the vices,

Many vices, amicably buoyed, float among the virtues.

For, albeit sin is hate, a foul and bitter turpitude,

As hurling back against the Giver all his gifts with insult,

Still when concrete in the sinner, it will seem to partake of his attrac

tions,

And in seductive masquerade shall cloak its leprous skin;

His broken lights of beauty shall illume its utter black,

And those refracted rays glitter on the hunch of its deformity

VERILY the fancy may be false, yet hath it met me in my musings,
(As expounding the pleasantness of pleasure, but no ways extenuating
licence,)

That even those yearnings after beauty, in wayward wanton youth,
When guileless of ulterior end, it craveth but to look upon the lovely,
Seem like struggles of the soul, dimly remembering pre-existence,
And feeling in its blindness for a long-lost god, to satisfy its longing;
As if the sucking babe, tenderly mindful of his mother,

Should pull a dragon's dugs, and drain the teats of poison.

Our primal source was beauty, and we pant for it ever and again; But sin hath stopped the way with thorns; we turn aside, wander, and are lost.

GOD, the undiluted good, is root and stock of beauty,

And every child of reason drew his essence from that stem.
Therefore, it is of intuition, an innate hankering for home,
A sweet returning to the well, from which our spirit flowed,
That we, unconscious of a cause, should bask these darkened souls

In some poor relics of the light that blazed in primal beauty,

And, even like as exiles of idolatry, should quaff from the cisterns of

creation

Stagnant draughts, for those fresh springs that rise in the Creator.

ONLY, being burthened with the body, spiritual appetite is warped,
And sensual man, with taste corrupted, drinketh of pollutions:
Impulse is left, but indiscriminate; his hunger feasteth upon carrion;
His natural love of beauty doateth over beauty in decay.

He still thirsteth for the beautiful; but his delicate ideal hath grown

gross,

And the very sense of thirst hath been fevered from affection into

passion.

He remembereth the blessedness of light, but it is with an old man's

memory,

A blind old man from infancy, that once hath seen the sun,

Whom long experience of night hath darkened in his cradle recol

lections,

Until his brightest thought of noon is but a shade of black

all pervading;

THIS then is thy charm, O beauty,
And this thy wondrous strength, O beauty, conqueror of all:
The outline of our shadowy best, the pure and comely creature,
That winneth on the conscience with a saddening admiration:
And some untutored thirst for God, the root of every pleasure,

Native to creatures, yea in ruin, and dating from the birthday of the

soul.

For God sealeth up the sum, confirmed exemplar of proportions,

Rich in love, full of wisdom, and perfect in the plenitude of Beauty. (9)

OF FAME.

BLOW the trumpet, spread the wing, fling thy scroll upon the sky, Rouse the slumbering world, O Fame, and fill the sphere with echo: -Beneath thy blast they wake, and murmurs come hoarsely on the

wind,

And flashing eyes and bristling hands proclaim they hear thy message:
Rolling and surging as a sea, that upturned flood of faces

Hasteneth with its million tongues to spread the wondrous tale;
The hum of added voices groweth to the roaring of a cataract,
And rapidly from wave to wave is tossed that exaggerated story,
Until those stunning clamours, gradually diluted in the distance,
Sink ashamed, and shrink afraid of noise, and die away.
Then brooding Silence, forth from his hollow caverns,

Cloaked and cowled, and gliding along, a cold and stealthy shadow,
Once more is mingled with the multitude, whispering as he walketh,
And hushing all their eager ears to hear some newer Fame.

So all is still again; but nothing of the past hath been forgotten;
A stirring recollection of the trumpet ringeth in the hearts of men:
And each one, either envious or admiring, hath wished the chance
were his

To fill as thus the startled world with fame, or fear, or wonder.
This lit thy torch of sacrilege, Ephesian Eratostratus; (10)

This dug thy living grave, Pythagoras, the traveller from Hades;
For this, dived Empedocles into Ætna's fiery whirlpool;

For this conquerors, regicides, and rebels, have dared their perilous crimes.