" Oh, talk as we may of beauty as a thing to be chiselled from
marble or wrought out on canvas, speculate as we may upon its colors and
outlines, what is it but an intellectual abstraction, after all? The
heart feels a beauty of another kind; looking through the outward
environment, it discovers a deeper and more real loveliness.
This was well understood by the old painters. In their pictures of
Mary, the virgin mother, the beauty which melts and subdues the gazer is
that of the soul and the affections, uniting the awe and mystery of that
mother's miraculous allotment with the irrepressible love, the
unutterable tenderness, of young maternity,--Heaven's crowning miracle
with Nature's holiest and sweetest instinct. And their pale Magdalens,
holy with the look of sins forgiven,--how the divine beauty of their
penitence sinks into the heart! Do we not feel that the only real
deformity is sin, and that goodness evermore hallows and sanctifies its
dwelling-place? When the soul is at rest, when the passions and desires
are all attuned to the divine harmony,--
"Spirits moving musically
To a lute's well-ordered law,"
The Haunted Palace, by Edgar A. Poe.
do we not read the placid significance thereof in the human countenance?
"I have seen," said Charles Lamb, "faces upon which the dove of peace
sat brooding.
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