We should live for beauty as well as use.

Beautiful forms,

colors and sounds excite in the lovers of the beautiful the purest delight, and it is exceedingly painful for them to gaze upon deformity. Decidedly, the love of the beautiful multiplies our sources of enjoyment, and thus leaves less room in the soul for low thoughts and ignoble pleasures. When selfishly indulged, it becomes desecrated, like all good gifts. But unperverted, its influence is refining and improving; whatever renders man less rude and coarse, places him in more harmonious relations with the good and true, and renders him more receptive to their influence. Men must be physically well situated, physically developed, physically prepared, before they can have a high conception of the beautiful and the good.

Everything is designed to subserve a purpose in the universe of the All-wise. The globe is filled with health, beauty and fragrance. Unhappy, indeed, the mind which can neither see their proportions nor enjoy their magnetic principles.

Truths which

Heal and soothe and bless,

Are scattered at the feet of man like flowers.

Flowers deserve universal attention. The poetic mind looks deepest into flowers. They are gentle in their loveliness, delightful in their fragrance, magical in their tender touches of wisdom, sublime in their mountainous grandeur, holy in their significant teachings. They are both attractive and suggestive, and abound no less in moral instruction than in beauty and sweetness, which are, in truth, the very perfection of elegance, sweetness and delight.

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds;

Fresh roses drip with sweetness there;

Beauty being the form under which the intellect prefers to study nature, the mind is taken captive by those lovely

teachers. There is undoubtedly the closest affinity between a proper cultivation of a flower garden and the right discipline of the mind. The industry and diligence which are so requisite to clear a garden from its useless weeds will naturally suggest to a thoughtful person how much more necessary it is to exert the same diligence in rooting from our minds their various follies, vices and prejudices, and cultivating beauty, truth and harmonious completeness. There exists a relation between nature and man which, rightly understood, has a significant correspondence.

The spiritual forces in the soul, like the natural forces in nature, when properly directed and applied, develop harmonious consequences. The heart must be warmed and the moral nature awakened before the highest order of beauty can be attained. It does one good to admire the beautiful, but it is infinitely more soulful to love it. There is a fixed connection between what man admires and what he is in reality.

Art is the transformation of lower substances into use. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy. We should consult the line of beauty and the ease of nature. There is a compelling reason in the uses of the plant for every novelty of color and form. A fly's wing and a whistling orb, a curling vine and a comet in space, come from the action of the same law. The coming together of atoms, according to their inherent relations and essential affinities, making the phenomena of all forms of beauty.

A sense of gradation is what allows the artist to construct a totality of forms, colors, sounds, and incidents. Even the fashions follow a law of gradation, and a cultivated eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion. The theory of dancing is to recover continually, in changes, the lost equilibrium-not by abrupt and angular, but by gradual and

curving movements. If you strike a discord, let down the ear by an intermediate note to the accord again. Many an experiment fails because it is offensively sudden.

A flower that does with opening morn arise,
And, flourishing the day, at evening dies;
A winged eastern blast, just skimming o'er
The ocean's brow, and sinking on the shore;

A fire, whose flames through crackling stubble fly,
A meteor shooting from the summer sky;

A bowld adown the bending mountain roll'd;

A bubble breaking, and a fable told;

A noontide shadow, and a midnight dream

Are emblems which, with semblance apt, proclaim
Our earthly course.

NUMBERS LEAD INTO ALL THE SECRETS OF HARMONY.

Every human emotion has its corresponding intonations. Mathematics are at the bottom of all system and order in music; and music, in its perfect and full expression, is a revelation of the whole system of nature. Here we find the original of Beethoven's symphonies, the essentials of Mozart's orchestral interpretations, the spiritual richness and fairy delicacies of Weber, the sacred beauty and natural sweetness of Mendelssohn's oratorios, the affectionate energy and inspiring ideality of Wagner-in a word, in the fundamental principles and in the soul-sounds of the harmonious system of nature are found all the existing and all the possible musical development of mankind. Each had vast insight concerning the essential causes and universal harmonies of nature. The only perfect musical instrument is the manifold perfections of the two-fold universe.

A true artist is one who is compelled to deal with the definite, the explicit, the stern, the severe, the ugly, the grotesque, the painful, the discordant, the despairing, the

self-sacrificing; and thus and from these facts, separately impressed upon his devoted, self-torturing imagination, he slowly and faithfully evolves the unity and the beauty, and the usually unseen enchantments of nature, into harmonious lights and shades upon canvas. So, too, the true music artist works into and out of excruciating discords-unfolds from the fatiguing details of common sounds, and from the depths of jargon-the grand symphonies, the marvelous orchestral combinations, the wonderful music, of surrounding nature. The more perfect and analytical the master, the more true and enchanting are his synthetical interpretations of the universe of sounds which exist without and within him, because he is faithful to the facts and laws of his knowledge, and because he can impart both his inspirations and the grand results of his knowledge to mankind. A true seer of the secrets of the material system was the spiritual philosopher and gentle teacher, Pythagoras, whose clear analytical vision and far-reaching synthetical imagination discerned and combined the rhythmical harmonies of the infinite. What a deep lesson in psychophonics was taught by him who, by bodily purity, abstemiousness and meditation, heard the music of the spheres.

The marvelous combinations of music are beautifully revealed in the flow and formation of all the systems of space. When the eighth note is sounded, it is but the reproduction or re-appearance of the first note, acting as a bridge of vibrations for the formation of another series of sounds attuned to a still higher key. Thus no originally new sounds are evoked, but rather the fundamental sounds on differing scales, or in varying degrees of motion. Thus also in the structure, and among the sounding motions of the universe may be heard the pianissimo, the fortissimo, the crescendo, the diminuendo, the sforzando, all the half-notes of the chromatic

scale, and all the perfections of sounds which constitute the diapason of the vast system of immensity. The great system of universal harmonies. Everything follows the principle of evolution in its various progressive steps up the spiral ascent of nature. This visible process is that of progressive development. May not the bridge formed by the recurrence of the eighth note in the chromatic scale suggest the missing link in the ascending scale of organic life, which link disappeared after the ascending scale became established in nature, when this hermaphrodite organism perished from its feebleness and disuse.

There's Music in the sighing of a reed;

There's Music in the gushing of a rill;

There's Music in all things, if men had ears;
The Earth is but an echo of the spheres.

ART EXALTS BEAUTY ABOVE NATURE.

Art has its end and aim in the representation of the ideal. The ideal is a degree of perfection superior to natural beauty. It is beauty disengaged and purified from the accidents which alter its purity in the real world. It is the real idealized, purified, rendered conformable to its ideas, and perfectly expressing it. It is life, but spiritual life. The ideal is an idea advanced to perfection-the present purified. The characteristics of the ideal are calmness, serenity, felicity, happy existence, freedom from the miseries and wants of life. It does not exclude earnestness in the world of conflict, or lessen life's interests. It is the felicity in suffering, the glorification of sorrow smiling in tears. The tear is rendered by the smile precious above the smile itself.

In everything the ideal begets the actual. The soul of a true artist reveals itself through all deficiencies of material. Painting is the art of expressing the conceptions of the soul by means of the realities of nature, represented by their forms