Nevertheless we find the
offices of the trio marked with a sufficient distinction. Just as
the Intellect concerns itself with Truth, so Taste informs us of the
Beautiful, while the Moral Sense is regardful of Duty. Of this latter,
while Conscience teaches the obligation, and Reason the expediency,
Taste contents herself with displaying the charms:- waging war upon
Vice solely on the ground of her deformity- her disproportion- her
animosity to the fitting, to the appropriate, to the harmonious- in
a word, to Beauty.
An immortal instinct deep within the spirit of man is thus plainly a
sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in
the manifold forms, and sounds, and odors and sentiments amid which he
exists. And just as the lily is repeated in the lake, or the eyes of
Amaryllis in the mirror, so is the mere oral or written repetition
of these forms, and sounds, and colors, and odors, and sentiments a
duplicate source of delight. But this mere repetition is not poetry.
He who shall simply sing, with however glowing enthusiasm, or with
however vivid a truth of description, of the sights, and sounds, and
odors, and colors, and sentiments which greet him in common with all
mankind- he, I say, has yet faded to prove his divine title. There
is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to
attain.
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