Keats, who of all our recent poets was the most imbued with a conception of the poetic beauties of the Greek mythology, has a passage full of antique grace:-

By the feud

"Twixt Nothing and Creation, I here swear,

Eterne Apollo! that thy Sister fair

Is of all these the gentlier-mightiest.

When thy gold breath is misting in the west,

She unobserved steals unto her throne,

And there she sits most meek and most alone;
As if she had not pomp subservient;

As if thine eye, high Poet! was not bent
Towards her with the Muses in thine heart;

As if the minist'ring stars kept not apart,
Waiting for silver-footed messages.

O Moon! the oldest shadows 'mongst oldest trees
Feel palpitations when thou lookest in:

O Moon! old boughs lisp forth a holier din
The while they feel thine airy fellowship.
Thou dost bless every where, with silver lip
Kissing dead things to life. The sleeping kine,
Couch'd in thy brightness, dream of fields divine.
Innumerable mountains rise, and rise
Ambitious for the hallowing of thine eyes;

And yet thy benediction passeth not

One obscure hiding-place, one little spot

Where pleasure may be sent : the nested wren
Has thy fair face within its tranquil ken,
And from beneath a sheltering ivy leaf
Takes glimpses of thee; thou art a relief
To the poor patient oyster, where it sleeps
Within its pearly house. The mighty deeps,
The monstrous sea is thine-the myriad sea!
O Moon! far spooming Ocean bows to thee,
And Tellus feels her forehead's cumbrous load.

Coleridge sees in the shifting aspects of the Moon emblems of human griefs and joys:-
Mild Splendour of the various-vested Night!

Mother of wildly-working visions! hail!
I watch thy gliding, while with watery light
Thy weak eye glimmers through a fleecy veil,
And when thou lovest thy pale orb to shroud
Behind the gather'd blackness lost on high;
And when thou dartest from the wind-rent cloud
Thy placid lightning o'er the awaken'd sky

Ah, such is Hope! as changeful and as fair!
Now dimly peering on the wistful sight,
Now hid behind the dragon-wing'd Despair:
But soon emerging in her radiant might

She o'er the sorrow-clouded breast of Care

Sails, like a meteor kindling in its flight.

With the glories of the Moon are associated the "company of stars." Leyden's Ode to the Evening Star is full of tenderness:

How sweet thy modest light to view,

Fair star! to love and lovers dear;
While trembling on the falling dew,

Like beauty shining through the tear;
Or hanging o'er that mirror-stream

To mark each image trembling there,
Thou seem'st to smile with softer gleam
To see thy lovely face so fair.
Though blazing o'er the arch of night,

The moon thy timid beams outshine,
As far as thine each starry night-

Her rays can never vie with thine.
Thine are the soft enchanting hours,
When twilight lingers on the plain,
And whispers to the closing flow'rs

That soon the sun will rise again.
Thine is the breeze that murmuring, bland
As music, wafts the lover's sigh,
And bids the yielding heart expand

In love's delicious ecstasy.

Fair star! though I be doom'd to prove

That rapture's tears are mix'd with pain;

Ah! still I feel 'tis sweet to love

But sweeter to be loved again.

But there is something higher in the contemplation of the starry heavens than thoughts
"to love and lovers dear." Shakspere has seized upon the grandest idea with which we can
survey the firmament—an idea which another great poet has in some degree echoed:-
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

In deep of night, when drowsiness
Hath lock'd up mortal sense, then listen I
To the celestial Sirens' harmony,
That sit upon the nine infolded spheres,
And sing to those that hold the vital shears,
And turn the adamantine spindle round,
On which the fate of gods and men is wound.
Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie,

SHAKSPERE

To lull the daughter of Necessity,
And keep unsteady Nature to her law,
And the low world in measured motion draw
After the heavenly tune, which none can hear
Of human mould, with gross unpurgèd ear.

237.-THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE USEFUL.

MILTON.

WIELAND

[CHRISTOPH MARTIN WIELAND, a most voluminous German writer, was born in Suabia in 1733, and died in 1813. During this long life his labours were unremitting, and were chiefly directed to the establishment of a native German literature, and to familiarizing his countrymen with the best models of composition. He was the first translator of Shakspere, and he translated many of the great writers of antiquity. In the writings of M. de Balzac, a now forgotten French author of the seventeenth century, more remarkable for his platitudes, conceits, and witticisms, than for any thing else, there is a passage in which the German critic and poet found much pleasure," in spite of its epigrammatic turn, on account of the simplicity and obvious truth of the closing image in which the thought is clothed." "We require," says Balzac," books for recreation and delight, as well as for instruction and business. Those are pleasant, these useful, and the human mind needs both. The canonical law and Justinian's code are held in honour, and are paramount in the universities; but we do not on that account banish Homer and Virgil. We should cultivate the olive and the vine, without eradicating the rose and the myrtle." I nevertheless, says Wieland, find in this passage two things on which to remark. He then proceeds to a criticism on 'The Beautiful and the Useful,' which is the subject of the following translation.]

Balzac, the pedant, who views the favourite of the Muses and their works with turned-up nose, assumes too much when he reckons Homer and Virgil merely among the pleasing authors. Wiser antiquity thought very differently; and Horace maintains, with good reason, that more practical philosophy is to be learned from Homer than from Crantor and Chrysippus.

It next appears to me, that generally it shows more of a trafficking than a philosophical mode of thinking, when we place the agreeable and the useful in opposition, and look at one, as compared with the other, with a sort of contempt.

Supposing that the case assumed is where the agreeable offends against the laws of a healthy moral feeling; yet even then the useful, in so far as opposed to the agreeable and the beautiful, is enjoyed merely in common with the lowest animals; and if we love and prize what is useful to us in this sense, we do nothing more than what the ox and the ass do also. The worth of this usefulness depends on its being more or less necessary. So far as a thing is necessary for the maintenance of the human species and civil society, so far it is certainly something good; but not, therefore, something excellent. We, therefore, desire the useful, not for itself, but only on account of the advantages we draw from it. The beautiful, on the contrary, we love from an inward superiority of our nature over the merely animal nature; for among all animals, man alone is gifted with a perception of order, beauty, and grace. Hence it comes that he is so much the more perfect, so much the more a man, the more extended and deep-seated is his love for the beautiful, and the more finely and certainly he is enabled by his feelings to discriminate the different degrees and sorts of beauty. Therefore, it is also that the perception of the beautiful, in art as well as in manners and morals, distinguishes the social, developed, and civilised man from the savage and the barbarian; indeed, all art, without exception, and science itself, owe their worth almost entirely to this love of the beautiful and the perfect implanted in the breast of man. They would now be immeasurably below the height to which they have ascended in Europe, if they had been confined within the narrow boundaries of the necessary and the useful, in the common sense of the words.

This restriction was what Socrates recommended; and if he was ever wrong in any case it was surely in this. Kepler and Newton would never have discovered the laws of the universe-the most beautiful system ever produced by thought from the human mind—if they, following his precept, had confined geometry merely to the measuring of fields, and astronomy to the merely necessary use of land and seatravellers and almanac-makers.

Socrates exhorts the painter and the sculptor to unite the beautiful and the agreeable with the useful; as he encourages the pantomimic dancer to ennoble the pleasure that his art may be capable of giving, and to delight the heart at the same time with the senses. According to the same principle, he must desire every labourer who occupies himself about something necessary, to unite the useful as much as possible with the beautiful. But to allow no value for beauty, except where it is useful, is a confusion of ideas.

Beauty and grace are undoubtedly united by nature itself with the useful: but they are not, therefore desirable because they are useful; but because, from the nature of man, he enjoys a pure pleasure in their contemplation—a pleasure precisely similar to that which the contemplation of virtue gives; a necessity as imperative for man as a reasonable being, as food, clothing, and a habitation are for him as an animal.

I

say for him as an animal, because he has much in common with all or most other animals. But neither these animal wants, nor the capability and desire to satisfy them, make him a man. While he procures his food, builds himself a nest, takes to himself a mate, leads his young, fights with any other who would deprive him of his food or take possession of his nest; in all this he acts, so far as it is merely corporeal, as an animal. Merely through the skill and manner in which, as a man, he performs all these animal-like acts (where not reduced to and retained in an animal state by external compulsory causes), does he distinguish and elevate hiraself above all other animals, and evince his human nature. For this animal that calls itself man, and this only, has an inborn feeling for beauty and order, has a heart disposed to social communication, to compassion and sympathy, and to an infinite variety of pleasing and beautiful feelings; has a strong tendency to imitate and create, and labours incessantly to improve whatever it has invented or formed.

All these peculiarities together separate him essentially from the other animals, ender him their lord and master, place earth and ocean in his power, and lead him step by step so high through the nearly illimitable elevation of his capacity for art, that he is at length in a condition to remodel nature itself, and from the materials it affords him to create a new, and, for his peculiar purpose, a more perfectly adjusted world.

The first thing in which man displays this superiority is in the refining and elevating all the wants, instincts, and functions which he has in common with the animal. The time which this may require does not signify. It is sufficient that he at length succeeds; that he no longer depends on mere chance for his maintenance; and the increased security of more abundant and better food leaves him leisure to think of improving the remaining requirements of his life. He invents one art after another; each one increases the security or the pleasure of his existence; and he thus ascends unceasingly from the absolutely necessary to the convenient, from the convenient to the beautiful.

The natural society in which he is born, united to the necessity of guarding against the ill consequences of a wide dispersion of the human race, produces at length civil establishments and social modes of life.

But even then, he has scarcely provided for what is absolutely necessary for the means of inward and outward security, than we see him occupied in a thousand

ways in adorning his new condition. Little villages are imperceptibly transformed into great cities, the abodes of the arts and of commerce, and the points of union between the various nations of the earth. Man extends himself on all sides, and in every sense navigation and trade increase his social relations and occupations, and they multiply the wants and goods of life. Riches and pleasure refine every art, of which necessity and want were the parents. Leisure, love of fame, and public encouragement promote the growth of the sciences; which, by the light they shed upon every object of human life, become again rich sources of new advantages and enjoyments.

But in the same degree that man adorns and improves his external condition, are his perceptions developed also for moral beauty. He renounces the rough and inhuman customs of the savage, learns to abhor all violent conduct towards his fellows, and accustoms himself to the rules of justice and equity. The various relations of the social state form and fix the notions of respectability and civility; and the desire of making himself agreeable to others, of obtaining their esteem, teaches him to suppress his passions, to conceal his faults, to assume his best appearance, and always to act in the most becoming manner. In a word, his manner improves with his condition.

Through all these steps he elevates himself at length to the highest degree of perfection of which the mind is capable in the present life, to an enlarged idea of the whole of which he is a part, to the ideal of the beautiful and the good, to wisdom and virtue, and to the adoration of the inscrutable First Cause, the universal Father of all, to recognise and perform whose laws is at the same time his greatest privilege, his first duty, and his purest pleasure.

And now may

All this we may at once call the advancement of human nature. every one answer for himself the question—would man have made that advance if the inborn feeling for the beautiful and the becoming had remained in him inactive? Take it away, and all the effects of his formative power, all the memorials of his greatness, all the riches of nature and art in the possession of which he has placed himself, vanish; he sinks back into the merely animal rank of the stupid and insensible natives of Australia, and with him nature also sinks into barbarism and chaotic deformity.

What are all the steps by which man advances himself by degrees towards perfection but refinements ?-refinements in his wants, modes of living, his clothing, dwelling, furniture ?—refinements of his mind and his heart, of his sentiments and his passions, of his language, morals, customs, and pleasures?

What an advance from the first hut to a palace of Palladio's !—from the canoe of a Carribbean to a ship of the line!—from the three rude idols, as the Boeotians in the olden times represented their protecting goddesses, to the Graces of Praxiteles ;-from a village of the Hottentots or wild Indians to a city like London !— from the ornaments of a female of New Zealand to the splendid dress of a Sultana ! -from the language of a native of Tahiti to that of a Homer, a Virgil, a Tasso, a Milton, or a Voltaire !

Through what innumerable degrees of refinement must man and his works have proceeded, before they had placed this almost immeasurable distance behind them ! The love of embellishment and refinement, and the dissatisfaction with a lower degree as soon as a higher has been recognised, are the only true and most simple motives by which man has advanced to what we see him. Every people who have become civilised are a proof of this principle; and if any are found, who, without peculiar physical or moral hindrances, continue in the same state of unimproveability, or betray a complete want of impulse to improvement, we must consider them rather as a sort of human animals than as actually men of our race and species.