The great business--the providing for the first wants of life--done, industry is rewarded not by absolute rest and idleness, but by the succession of new and higher wants, which the growing mind demands; and it accordingly taxes the senses, and gives them command to be purveyors, and cultivates them for the purpose of enlarged gratification. They are thus capable of great extension, and, as it were, of an influx of living power to awaken and spiritualise their dormant or inert matter. All life is in progression: sciences must be discovered; arts must be created; and could we conceive an entirely sluggish and uncultivated social state, how few would see what may be seen, or hear what may be heard! The earth, teeming with sights of wonder, and breathed over with a divine music, would be to its inhabitants, in such a condition, but a waste and thankless wilderness. And which is nature--the bare, the imperceptible, for any beauty it contains, or the riches of the mind's discovery, the imaginative creation? We are inventive, that we may discover what nature is; nor is that the less, but rather the more, nature which is art. Art is but nature discovered--the hidden brought to light, and home to us, and acknowledged and felt--more or less felt as we cultivate reciprocally the mind through the senses, and the senses through the mind. With this view, all the artificial enchantments of life are nature--all arts, all sciences: for how could they be to embellish society,--indeed without which there would be no _society_--had they not an independent existence somewhere in the great storehouse of infinity, and were they not bountifully thrown out to us as truths to gather, as fruits to nourish and to gratify? We would wish to vindicate all nature, and unfetter it from that petty distinction which many are fond of drawing between nature and art. These make but one whole. For why should we separate ourselves, with all our faculties, perceptive and inventive, from our intimate and purposed connexion with the great universe? It is nature, because it is every where man's doing, to write and act plays, to compose music, and to paint pictures, raise noble edifices, and make marble seem to live in statues. And besides, as man himself is the chief work of nature, so is that which he does, even out of a partial imitation of other nature, the more natural, as it to a certain degree recedes from its model, and participates in and adopts the feeling of him that makes it. It is this nature which makes beauty perfect--which renders the music of Handel better than the sounds of winds and waters, and of a higher nature than they, as it is of a more extensive power, in all variety of movement, to touch our feelings, and stir us at will. And such is poetry, which influences us where fact fails. And all this not by mere imitation, which some are so fond of thrusting forward as the means; for there is nothing quite like to itself. With such means of