Desire is burning, impetuous, sad. The sentiment of the beautiful, free from all desire, and always without fear, elevates and warms the soul, and may transport it even to enthusiasm, without making it know the troubles of passion. The artist sees only the beautiful where the sensual man sees only the alluring and the frightful. On a vessel tossed by a tempest, while the passengers tremble at the sight of the threatening waves, and at the sound of the thunder that breaks over their heads, the artist remains absorbed in the contemplation of the sublime spectacle. Vernet has himself lashed to the mast in order to contemplate for a longer time the storm in its majestic and terrible beauty. When he knows fear, when he participates in the common feeling, the artist vanishes, there no more remains any thing but the man. The sentiment of the beautiful is so far from being desire, that each excludes the other. Let me take a common example. Before a table loaded with meats and delicious wines, the desire of enjoyment is awakened, but not the sentiment of the beautiful. Suppose that if, instead of thinking of the pleasures which all these things spread before my eyes promise me, I only take notice of the manner in which they are arranged and set upon the table, and the order of the feast, the sentiment of the beautiful might in some degree be produced; but surely this will be neither the need nor the desire of appropriating this symmetry, this order. It is the property of beauty not to irritate and inflame desire, but to purify and ennoble it. The more beautiful a woman is,--I do not mean that common and gross beauty which Reubens in vain animates with his brilliant coloring, but that ideal beauty which antiquity and Raphael understood so well,--the more, at the sight of this noble creature is desire tempered by an exquisite and delicate sentiment, and is sometimes even replaced by a disinterested worship. If the Venus of the Capitol, or the Saint Cecilia, excites in you sensual desires, you are not made to feel the beautiful. So the true artist addresses himself less to the senses than to the soul; in painting beauty he only seeks to awaken in us sentiment; and when he has carried this sentiment as far as enthusiasm, he has obtained the last triumph of art. The sentiment of the beautiful is, therefore, a special sentiment, as the idea of the beautiful is a simple idea. But is this sentiment, one in itself, manifested only in a single way, and applied only to a single kind of beauty? Here again--here, as always--let us interrogate experience.