This is Coleridge’s definition:—Art then is nature, _humanised_; and in proportion as humanity is elevated by the interfusion into our life of noble aims and pure affections will art be spiritualised and moralised. [Illustration] 99. If faith has elevated art, superstition has everywhere debased it. [Illustration] 100. Goethe observes that there is no patriotic art and no patriotic science—that both are universal. There is, however, _national_ art, but not _national_ science: we say “national art,” “natural science.” [Illustration] 101. “Verse is in itself music, and the natural symbol of that union of passion with thought and pleasure, which constitutes the essence of all poetry as contradistinguished from history civil or natural.”—_Coleridge._ In the arts of design, colour is to form what verse is to prose—a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought. [Illustration] 102. Subjects and representations in art not elevated nor interesting in themselves, become instructive and interesting to higher minds from the _manner_ in which they have been treated; perhaps because they have passed through the medium of a higher mind in taking form. This is one reason, though we are not always conscious of it, that the Dutch pictures of common and vulgar life give us a pleasure apart from their wonderful finish and truth of detail. In the mind of the artist there must have been the power to throw himself into a sphere _above_ what he represents. Adrian Brouwer, for instance, must have been something far better than a sot; Ostade something higher than a boor; though the habits of both led them into companionship with sots and boors. In the most farcical pictures of Jan Steen there is a depth of feeling and observation which remind me of the humour of Goldsmith; and Teniers, we know, was in his habits a refined gentleman; the brilliant elegance of his pencil contrasting with the grotesque vulgarity of his subjects. To a thinking mind, some of these Dutch pictures of character are full of material for thought, pathetic even where least sympathetic: no doubt, because of a latent sympathy with the artist, apart from his subject. [Illustration] 103. Coleridge says,—“Every human feeling is greater and larger than the exciting cause.” (A philosophical way of putting Rochefoucauld’s neatly expressed apophthegm: “Nous ne sommes jamais ni si heureux ni si malheureux que nous l’imaginons.”) “A proof,” he proceeds, “that man is designed for a higher state of existence; and this is deeply implied in music, in which there is always something more and beyond the immediate expression.”